Mastercard announced on Thursday its plans to halt the issuance of cards with a magnetic strip by 2033. The global financial firm will have strip-less debt and credit cards in Europe starting from 2024, and across the globe by 2033, Mastercard declared in a statement. The company claimed that it will be the first payments network to phase out the technology, which dates to the 1960s. “Magnetic strip is reaching its expiration date with […]
FinTech
Japanese operator Rakuten Mobile Inc. released on Wednesday its Q2 2021 financial report demonstrating a bursting operating loss increase of 85 percent year on year (YoY) amounting to $900 million credited to higher network-related expenses. Due to the semiconductor shortage, the firm’s costs soared as the network rollout was postponed for approximately three months. The […]
Robinhood Markets confirmed on Tuesday its first acquisition plans since the release of its initial public offering (IPO) earlier this month of obtaining venture-backed startup Say Technology for around $140 million in cash. The trading service company revealed the deal in a blog post from the company’s chief product officer, Aparna Chennapragada, without disclosing when […]
Amidst Washington’s deadlock with Beijing, China Telecom may potentially elevate its Shanghai’s initial public offering (IPO) to more than $8 billion leading to its biggest offering this year in the Shanghai Stock Exchange, following the firm’s delisting in its New York counterpart (NYSE) in January. Following Chinese media reports, the Beijing-based firm established its IPO at $0.70 per share, inflating the firm’s worth […]
Special-purpose acquisition company Athena Acquisition Corp. announced on Wednesday, alongside technology service provider Pico, definitive merger plans amounting to $1.75 billion. Pico Quantitative Trading – solutions provider to the financial market community – agrees to a merger with blank-check company Athena Acquisition, led by former The Bancorp CEO Betsy Cohen. The deal is set to […]
Popular investing company Robinhood Markets began trading on Thursday its initial public offering at $38 a share, followed by a 10 percent drop, and closing at $34.90. This came following an announcement on Saturday its plans to launch U.S. retirement accounts as an endeavor to raise its bidding. The investing platform had aimed to raise […]
The pandemic has placed a spotlight on all things seamless; from restaurant menus, hotel check-ins, and even trickling down to FinTech and digital banking services. This focus has accelerated coming of a digital economy that looks to harness the technological advancements that the world has witnessed since the start of the COVID-19 health crisis, which […]
While MedTech, digitization, and remote working have sucked up the entirety of the technological limelight during the highs and lows of the COVID-19 pandemic, a sleeping giant has also been growing in the background. That sleeping giant: contactless technologies. We have used forms of the technology in a plethora of ways, to ordering food and […]
Commerce has come a long way in the 21st century; it has evolved from the simple act of exchanging banknotes for goods, to the current digital age where you can make transactions by a digital currency mined by someone on the other side of the planet. Commerce transformed into eCommerce, and with it came a […]
Even by Bitcoin’s standards, Wednesday was pretty wild. The price of the famously volatile digital currency fell nearly 30% at one point after the China Banking Association warned member banks of the risks associated with digital currencies. The decline narrowed to below 10% in the afternoon, but Bitcoin had still lost about $70 billion in […]