Latest news with #merchants
Finextra
a day ago
- Business
- Finextra
FIS and Kipp to counter the challenge of declined transactions due to insufficient funds
FIS (NYSE: FIS), a global leader in financial technology, today announced a strategic partnership with Letskipp Ltd. (Kipp), a collaboration platform for card issuers and merchants, to introduce an innovative non-sufficient funds (NSF) authorization solution to its debit clients. 0 This first-to-market offer is designed to combat the long-standing challenge of declined transactions due to insufficient funds, which can help issuers recover lost revenue and drive top-of-wallet status with customers. With this solution, FIS is unlocking growth for its card issuing clients by helping to streamline financial operations, reduce friction and improve efficiency. Industry data shows that the leading cause of card declines is insufficient funds, causing revenue loss, customer frustration and higher contact center costs. For merchants, these declines result in lost sales and wasted product and time. For issuers, declined transactions bring unpredictability at the point of sale for customers, increasing consumer frustration and impacting loyalty. The solution offers issuers the ability to approve transactions even when the available balance is insufficient - without imposing overdraft fees on consumers - by enabling merchants to voluntarily pay a premium to authorize NSF transactions. This reimagined economic model can generate additional revenue for issuers while helping to preserve the customer experience at the point of sale. Through this partnership, issuers can quickly take advantage of this interconnected solution, helping money move dynamically through debit accounts, card networks and payment systems. 'As money moves between merchants, companies, and financial institutions and card issuers, every transfer should be timely and seamless. This partnership underscores FIS' commitment to helping our clients unlock new revenue streams and deliver smooth payment experiences,' said Jim Johnson, co-president, Banking Solutions, at FIS. 'Our NSF authorization solution with Kipp tackles a key point of friction in the payments journey, helping issuers retain customers and drive long-term value throughout the money lifecycle.' "We're excited to join forces with FIS to bring our innovative NSF solution to a broader market," said Chanan Lavi, CEO and co-founder of Kipp. 'By reducing declines, we're helping merchants and issuers to deepen customer relationships, protect transaction volume and grow revenue, without burdening consumers.' This solution reinforces FIS' accomplishments in helping deliver efficient, end-to-end experiences for businesses to bring the world's money into harmony.
CBC
5 days ago
- Business
- CBC
Montreal's open air market vendors call steep rent hike a slap in the face
Some merchants who lease space at the city's outdoor markets saw their rent nearly double this year. Montreal Public Markets, the non-profit that manages stalls at the Atwater and Jean Talon markets, says it's trying to standardize rent agreements with shops at all of its locations.
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
The Transaction That Never Happened: How Fraud Stifles Our Economy
Hacker and laptop made of binary code. Ones and zeros. With copy space. Across industries, economies, and every digital touchpoint in between, fraud is quietly compounding costs, not just by stealing money, but by stopping legitimate transactions before they even happen. While fraud attempts make headlines when a heist lands, there's a much more insidious problem right under the surface: the transaction that never happened because of our attempts to stop fraud before it happens. These are the losses you can't always see in your quarterly report: the customers you turned away because your system flagged them as risky, the potential revenue you missed by setting your fraud filters too tight, and the businesses that slowly destroy the trust between themselves and their consumers because a few bad actors shaped how they treat everyone. And it's only getting worse. Fraud is now multimodal. It doesn't show up just as stolen credit cards or phishing emails like it used to. Today, fraud arrives through fake IDs, deepfaked voices, spoofed IP addresses, social engineering over messaging apps, and increasingly, through AI-generated personas that can pass casual scrutiny Any app, voice, or face can be weaponized through any channel imaginable. According to recent estimates from Juniper Research, merchants are projected to lose over $362 billion globally to online payment fraud between 2023 and 2028. Meanwhile, the systems designed to catch this fraud are often blocking legitimate transactions as well with false positives routinely outnumbering actual fraud. The question that beckons an answer is simple, with answers that have deep roots: how do you protect your customers without treating them like suspects? 'Fraud doesn't just take the money in your account,' says Forter CEO and co-founder Michael Reitblat. 'It takes the trust in your system. And in trying to protect against it, too many companies go too far. They build walls so high that even their best customers can't climb over them.' He would know. Reitblat co-founded Forter with the belief that the future of fraud prevention shouldn't be focused solely on tightening the filters, but applying them smarter. That means knowing your customers deeply enough to recognize them when they show up, even if their device, location, or behavior looks slightly different than last time. 'We need to start by flipping the mental model companies approach fraud with,' Michael begins. 'Instead of assuming guilt and proving innocence, we should assume the customer is legitimate and be fast and smart enough to catch when they're not.' The reason why we don't see this approach being the norm is that it requires data, huge volumes of it, and systems that can learn over time. Forter's platform, for example, sits on top of a global network of merchants, letting it see patterns no single merchant could identify on their own. It's a distributed immune system for the digital economy. Much of the tech that modern fraud-detection relies on wasn't available just a few short years ago, and the industry is evolving faster than ever. While the tech is a key drive, Michael argues that the key to handling fraud better lies within consumer and vendor psychology. Simply put, we need to reframe what success in fraud prevention looks like. 'Everyone measures fraud prevented. But what about sales saved?' he asks. 'If your system blocks 99% of fraud but also turns away 10% of good customers, that's not success. That's loss. And it's often invisible, as is the lack of trust that underpins it all.' Zoom out from payments, and the same principles of trust apply across cybersecurity. Gil Geron, co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, has spent years helping companies secure their cloud environments. But for him, the real challenge is psychological as much as it is technological. 'Too much of cybersecurity is built around fear,' Geron says. 'Fear of breaches, fear of compliance issues. But when you lead with fear, you create friction. You slow down developers, frustrate employees, and erode trust internally.' The new wave of cybersecurity professionals often argue that when everything is cloud-first and developer-led, security can't be a blockade, it has to be a partner. Geron agrees and notes that the best security is invisible: it runs in the background, integrates seamlessly, and empowers teams rather than policing them. 'What we need is secure velocity,' he explains. 'Move fast, but safely. Don't just scan the environment once a month, understand what's happening in real time, with context. This way we ladder up to trust organically, and remove the sources of friction that keep good actors from transacting on the platforms they want.' The idea of context over details is a critical one. In fact, it can be transformative when weaponized on behalf of the consumer. Whether you're approving a payment or flagging a risky container in the cloud, the system needs to know what normal looks like in order to detect what's not. That requires machine learning, behavioral baselines, and yes, trust in your users who sometimes order flights to Aruba at 2am right after rejoining Netflix and ordering take-out from a Nepalese restaurant for the first time with the same credit card. 'Security isn't about saying no as the default,' Geron says. 'It's about having the necessary trust to say yes to the right people, in the right way, at the right time.' Thomas Brunner, CEO of Gigapay, sees the consequences of broken trust up close. His platform helps creators and freelancers get paid across borders. But in a world where fraudsters can fake identities and automate scams, the burden of trust has never been higher. 'In the creator economy, you don't have time to run a KYC check manually or hold payments for weeks,' Brunner explains. 'If you don't trust the user instantly, the whole model falls apart.' Gigapay uses a mix of real-time risk scoring and user behavior analysis to spot anomalies. But the key, Brunner says, is not punishing everyone for the mistakes of a few. 'Fraud is the exception, not the rule,' he says. 'If we design our systems assuming everyone is trying to cheat, we break the experience for the 99% who are just trying to earn a living.' The stakes are especially high in the gig economy, where payouts can make or break someone's rent. A missed transaction is a data point of deep actuarial interest for sure, but it's much more than that for those who it impacts. In fact, it's often a livelihood. 'Trust is the platform,' Brunner says. 'Without it, the economy doesn't move.' Sometimes, the block comes from a lack of trust in the tools we use themselves. Brooke Hartley Moy, CEO of Infactory, is building an AI insights engine designed for enterprises. Her platform helps companies find answers they can trust, pulling not just from the open web, but from verified datasets and curated sources. 'We make billion-dollar decisions based on AI,' Moy says. 'But the foundation of that AI is often unclear. Where did this answer come from? Who vetted it? Can I trust it?' That uncertainty, she argues, is its own form of friction. Friction we should work hard to minimize. Companies hesitate to deploy AI not because it doesn't work, but because they don't know when it will, or whether it might do something entirely different than tasked. 'Accuracy can't be an afterthought,' Moy explains. 'Having trust in your tools and the answers they give you is the difference between action and paralysis. If you can't trust the output, you won't move forward. And that's another kind of transaction that never happens.' For her, solving this trust gap is about structure and standards. We start with what the AI says, and we trust it based on how transparently and reliably it says it. 'The future of decision-making requires not just intelligence,' Moy adds. 'It requires provenance.' At Nightwing, an intelligence solutions company spun out of RTX, Chief Technology and Data Officer Chris Jones is thinking of fraud, trust and everything above on a bigger scale. His job is to figure out how to protect critical systems, not just from fraud, but from coordinated attacks on the scale of the digital infrastructure of entire countries. 'There isn't a more poignant set of threat vectors than the ones we're seeing now,' Jones says. 'And it's not just about stopping bad actors. It's about making sure the good ones can still operate.' He sees a future where cyber offense and defense break through their silos and blossom into strategic complements that build the foundations for trust across the entire economy. 'We've been playing defense for years,' he notes. 'But if we want to maintain a global digital order, we have to think about sustainability, resilience, and sometimes, deterrence.' In other words: just like in commerce, the real cost of a breach isn't just what's stolen. It's what's prevented. In the end, friction grinds the strongest of gears down to a halt. If attacks deter innovation, stifle engagement, or shake public confidence, they succeed without breaching a single firewall. 'The blue team can win,' Jones says. 'But we have to scale them faster than the red team evolves. That means tools, talent, and trust. It means reducing friction for the people doing the right thing.' Fraud captures our attention and it is easy to over-index on it just because of how often it is the signal that breaks through the noise. But its most dangerous form is quiet. It hides in checkout forms that never get filled, apps that go unopened, accounts that never activate. It sits in the unseen shadows of the economy. The almost-purchases, the never-hires, the frozen budgets and the client who never returns. Preventing this form of friction is first and foremost a design challenge. Those who want to surmount this challenge need to build systems that can treat trust as the default instead of the reward for perfect compliance. In the end, what drives growth isn't just the blue team's defense or a tighter fraud-filter. Instead, it's a firm belief that the system will work as intended. That the transaction will go through. That the other side is who they say they are. And when that belief is protected, the economy doesn't just survive. It thrives.
South China Morning Post
6 days ago
- Business
- South China Morning Post
Temu, Pinduoduo owner PDD faces profit challenge amid Trump tariffs, domestic competition
PDD on Tuesday reported a 47 per cent slump in first-quarter earnings amid slower sales growth, with results trailing market consensus. PDD's Nasdaq-listed shares tumbled as much as 18 per cent in New York overnight, as the company's poor report card suggested that continued discounts to attract consumers would hurt near-term earnings outlook. In the company's post-earnings call, PDD co-founder, chairman and co-chief executive Chen Lei said 'a slowdown in growth rate is inevitable' amid new challenges, which prompted the firm to boost support for merchants. Apart from intensified domestic competition, Chen pointed out that 'radical change in the external policy environment, such as tariffs, has created significant pressure for our merchants'. Those factors were expected to continue affecting PDD's profitability, according to UBS analysts in a research note published on Wednesday. 'Management's tone is cautious, highlighting macroeconomic uncertainties and significant investments in the ecosystem,' the analysts said. PDD in April pledged to invest 100 billion yuan (US$13.9 billion) in several initiatives to support merchants on its platform as well as consumers.
Globe and Mail
27-05-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
2 Brilliant Growth Stocks to Buy and Hold for 20 Years
The stock market has whipsawed back and forth to start 2025, and no one knows how the markets will perform the rest of the year. But history is clear: If you regularly buy shares of growing businesses, you're going to see those investments multiply into much larger sums down the road. Here are two companies still growing at high rates that are just getting started on tackling their long-term opportunity. 1. Shopify Shopify 's (NASDAQ: SHOP) business continues to grow at robust rates, as it becomes the go-to e-commerce platform for merchants to build and operate online stores. The stock has returned 3,800% since 2015, yet Shopify's share of global e-commerce spending is just 12%, leaving a long runway ahead. When merchants grow their sales, Shopify benefits. Subscriptions to use its online selling tools are just a small part of the company's revenue. Three-quarters of its revenue comes from merchant solutions, including payment processing, shipping, and other services. This means when you invest in Shopify, you're benefiting from the online sales growth of all the businesses that use the platform. Revenue grew 27% year over year in the first quarter. This reflects strong growth in gross merchandise volume across its merchant base, which increased 23% year over year to $74 billion in the quarter. The speed with which the company introduces new tools for its merchants to adapt to different economic environments is a competitive advantage. For example, its recent tariff guide tool, powered by artificial intelligence, makes it easier for small businesses to manage duty collection on cross-border sales. Management credits this ability to quickly launch new tools as the reason why its merchants have outperformed the broader e-commerce market. Wall Street is aware of Shopify 's long-term potential, which is why the stock trades at a high valuation of 15 times trailing revenue. This is below the stock's average 21 sales multiple in recent years. This growth stock still has a lot to offer patient shareholders over the next few decades. 2. Coupang Coupang (NYSE: CPNG) looks like an early-stage Amazon. It's the leading e-commerce brand in South Korea and continues to post double-digit revenue growth as it begins to expand in Taiwan. The stock price has doubled over the past three years and could grow in value for decades to come. Coupang had over 23 million active customers in the first quarter. This grew 9% year over year in the first quarter, but the company has a huge opportunity to drive more-frequent spending with many of these customers, as it follows Amazon's playbook of expanding selection and logistics infrastructure. Revenue grew 21% year over year on a constant-currency basis. It's seeing strong momentum with sellers taking advantage of its fulfillment services, where volumes are growing much faster than its overall business. Coupang's Rocket Delivery services, which promise next- or same-day delivery on millions of items, continue to win over customers. Coupang is bringing in premium brands through its Rocket service, such as Dolce & Gabbana. This suggests it is just tapping into its potential to drive higher spending by its customers. The number of customers purchasing across nine or more categories grew over 25% last quarter, much faster than the growth of its total customer base. It's very possible the company is on course to lead e-commerce markets across the Eastern Hemisphere, similar to Amazon's success in Western countries. Customers are clearly responding to its wide selection, fast shipping, and other benefits like food delivery and digital entertainment through Coupang's WOW membership program. The stock just broke to a new 52-week high following its first-quarter earnings results and could have room to run in 2025 and beyond. It trades at a price-to-sales multiple of 1.6, which is fair for a growing e-commerce business. Should you invest $1,000 in Shopify right now? Before you buy stock in Shopify, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Shopify wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $639,271!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $804,688!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is957% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to167%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 John Mackey, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, an Amazon subsidiary, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. John Ballard has positions in Coupang. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon and Shopify. The Motley Fool recommends Coupang. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
