Sat.Apr 15, 2017 - Fri.Apr 21, 2017

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Rue21, mode.ai Launch Virtual Stylists Via Facebook Messenger

PYMNTS

Facebook’s annual developer conference F8 is seeing its fair share of chatbot integration announcements. Now the fashion world is taking center stage as both Rue21 and mode.ai announce their plans for a virtual stylist offering through Facebook’s Messenger app. While Rue21 is working with artificial intelligence–driven shopping bot provider mode.ai to take advantage of Facebook’s newly launched Chat Extensions feature, mode.ai also announced its plans for its own integration.

Retail 78
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Stop Abusing Excel for Workforce and CAPEX Planning

Planful

For many organizations, staff compensation is the largest part of the expense budget. And getting CAPEX planning right can have a big impact on depreciation expenses and cash flow. Planning for these expense categories requires a great level of detailed and sensitive information. Yet many organizations rely on error-prone, unsecure spreadsheets, and email for handling these critical planning processes.

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VC Funds Adding More Cash For Future Funding

PYMNTS

It was a fairly quiet week for B2B startups on the venture capital front: Just three companies landed funding, all of which in the U.S., totaling $26 million. One startup focusing on enterprise cybersecurity blew the competition out of the water, accounting for nearly 80 percent of the total funds raised. And investment plans are looking up, with two venture capital funds announcing their own latest raises headed toward the B2B FinTech space in the future.

B2B 76
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Samsung Galaxy S8 Drops In U.S. — And The Complaints Begin

PYMNTS

For Samsung, the big day is here in the U.S. — the new flagship phone, the Galaxy S8, will hit U.S. shores today. After the very public fail of the S7 — and the costly product recall that followed — the launch is being watched with great interest segment-wide. So of course, the complaints are rolling in — though the good news is that this time they are far less serious than spontaneous combustion.

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Live Demo - Supercharge your Month End Close

Automation generally supercharges any process and brings its value to the forefront. See how infusing automation such as ART (our month-end close solution), into your close can get you to the next level of closing. We will share a live demo of SkyStem's solution, ART and share the key elements of month-end close automation. Through ART, we'll take a look at: What month-end close automation entails Which process steps can and should be automated Benefits of achieving process automation, and Why i

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Hollywood’s Newest Special Effect, Digital Banking?

PYMNTS

From phone support and mobile apps to ATMs and chatbots — when it comes to customer service, banking automation has come a long way. However, the one missing piece that these automated banking features lack is a real human being to interact with during a transaction. That’s something that Soul Machines, a New Zealand-based startup, is hoping to change.

Banking 72

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Hacker Tracker: New Threats And Old Classics

PYMNTS

Cybercriminals certainly had a habit of churning out headline-worthy attacks in 2016 — from the Mirai botnet’s infamous distributed-denial-of-service attacks on domain directory Dyn and the DNC hack to hackers targeting the SWIFT interbank system. With these and other high-profile cases, the world became acutely aware of vulnerabilities in the digital realm.

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Blockchain Tracker: Blockchain’s Impact On The Supply Chain Industry

PYMNTS

As the supply chain industry is one of the oldest businesses, it can sometimes be viewed as stodgy. While the industry has been around for well over a century, the term “supply chain management” wasn’t coined until the 1980s. CIO defines supply chain management as “the combination of art and science that goes into improving the way your company finds the raw components it needs to make a product or service and deliver it to customers.

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Billtrust, CardConnect Partner To Support Invoice Payments Via Card

PYMNTS

B2B payments company Billtrust is teaming up with payment processing firm CardConnect to facilitate the invoice-to-cash process, reports said Wednesday (April 19). Billtrust is integrating its payment cycle management tool, Quantum, into CardConnect’s B2B payments platform to facilitate the collection of invoice payments made via credit and debit cards.

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Uber Of X: Zeel Is The Uber Of Massages

PYMNTS

At the end of a long day or after a particularly strenuous workout, sometimes a hot bath or a massage can be just what the doctor ordered. Some physicians may also prescribe massages for those that have chronic back pain. While not everyone has their own personal masseuse on speed dial, the on-demand economy luckily has a solution for this in startup company Zeel.

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Mid-Year Review: How to Ignite Employee Potential Through Meaningful Feedback

Mid-year performance reviews aren’t just boxes for HR to check. Paycor’s toolkit empowers leaders to: Identify high-potential team members. Boost engagement with meaningful feedback. Support struggling employees. Nurture top talent to drive results. Learn how to ignite employee potential through meaningful feedback. When you nurture top talent, everybody wins.

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Bitcoin Tracker: No More Wire Transfers?

PYMNTS

Bitcoin’s (BTC) riding high once again as the third week of April rolls to a close. BTC values are rising to approach the all-time highs seen in early March before all the China troubles, the Securities and Exchange Commission denial double whammy and fears of a hard fork. The upward movement of BTC in April has been relatively steady nonetheless, boosted by adoption news out of Japan.

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Uber Of X: Heal Is The Uber Of Doctor Visits

PYMNTS

Finding the time to go to the doctor’s office can be a struggle. From working a full day at the office to exercising regularly, making dinner, doing laundry, visiting friends and family as well as finding time for yourself, trips to see a physician can seem like a hassle. Typically, most people try to schedule doctor visits either early in the morning or late in the afternoon so as to disrupt as little of home or work life as possible.

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Chatbot Tracker: Are Payments The Missing Link To Chatbot Success?

PYMNTS

As the saying goes, money makes the world go around. The same can be said for the potential future success of chatbots. In nearly every aspect of daily life, there’s some form of money being exchanged for goods and services. It’s nearly impossible to find a day where money isn’t flowing between retailers and consumers. With today’s economy becoming increasingly more connected over the past decade, there have been various forms of technology solutions developed along the way to assist in streamli

Retail 49
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Mastercard And PayRange Partner To Make Vending Cashless

PYMNTS

“Who wants to shop at vending machines?”. When PYMNTS first encountered PayRange CEO Paresh Patel at Innovation Project 2013 , he was leading a tiny startup with a big goal: to bring vending into the digital age. Yes, vending — those large, unattended kiosks that typically serve a wide variety of salty snacks and soda and are often found in hotel ice machine corridors.

Retail 47
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Your Accounting Expertise Will Only Get You So Far: What Really Matters

Speaker: Victor C. Barnes, CPA, MBA

In the climb from contributor to leader, the rules quietly change. If you’re aiming for the summit, the air gets thinner—and what got you here won’t be enough to get you to the top (a concept first popularized by Marshall Goldsmith in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There ). What made you successful early in your finance career—technical accuracy, sharp analysis, flawless execution—won’t be what carries you to the next level.

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How SME Accountants Approach The Threat And Opportunity Of Tech

PYMNTS

Change within the enterprise will always bring friction, but when it comes to change brought about by the adoption of more sophisticated technologies — especially in accounting and cash management — that friction is worth the effort. But the picture of technology adoption is a complex one, as cloud accounting company Sage has shown. Earlier this month the firm released a white paper that found the majority of SMEs say they prefer to stick to traditional tools and processes instead of endure the

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Tech Center: Charlotte On The Edge of Tech Greatness

PYMNTS

Just west of the Research Triangle in North Carolina, Charlotte’s technology industry has been slowly growing over the past few years. As we reported about three weeks ago, Bank of America has announced its plans to invest $1.5 million over the course of the next three years to build up a FinTech hub in Charlotte. With this news, we decided to focus our Tech Center on the up-and-coming North Carolina city.

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The Business Case For Protecting SME Borrowers

PYMNTS

When the Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights was developed in 2015, it appeared as if alternative SME lenders were collectively taking a stance against predatory lending practices in an effort to protect small businesses. While this is indeed true, Gina Harman, CEO of small business lender the Accion U.S. Network — which not only signed the Bill of Rights but helped design it — told PYMNTS that it’s imperative for the lenders to educate small businesses.

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CVS Looks To Get Healthy

PYMNTS

CVS looks to revamp its image and up wellness game in an effort to position itself as a health retailer. The national drugstore chain recently announced plans to reboot more of its physical stores to promote new lines of health and wellness products to do its new(ish) corporate name, CVS Health, proud. The health play isn’t just cosmetic. The new store design features a display, called the discovery zone, which features a broader assortment of healthy foods and wellness products along with

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The Hidden Science Behind Why Finance Teams Resist Change—And How to Fix It

Speaker: Kim Beynon, CPA, CGMA, PMP

The most overlooked, yet most critical, element of transformation is preparing people for change. Automation and AI aren't just technical upgrades, they’re cultural shifts which can challenge identities. That’s why change management isn’t a side project—it’s the foundation. In finance, where precision and process rule, navigating change can feel especially disruptive.

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How Third-Party Partners Became So Risky

PYMNTS

This week, enterprise security startup CyberGRX announced a new funding round, with investors at Bessemer Venture Partners leading the way for $20 million in Series B financing. The investment is not only a signal of VCs’ appetite for enterprise security offerings, but of enterprises themselves needing more sophisticated security tools. The message of the data on enterprise security is unmissable: Bbusinesses are facing more threats than ever before, from both within and outside of the enterpris

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Car Commerce Tracker: Apple Joins The Fray

PYMNTS

Everyone’s talking about it. Apple looks to have joined the race to develop self-driving technology. Though, as is typical with Apple projects, details are vague at best. Lest we forget the quintessential uttering by CEO Tim Cook at a company shareholder meeting last month: “ future stuff [we] can’t talk about.”. At the time, “future stuff” was widely thought to be a reference to augmented reality technology.

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Yahoo Bids Adieu With Earnings Beat

PYMNTS

In the end, Yahoo managed to beat the Street just before becoming property. As has been reported, Verizon is buying Yahoo, but the beleaguered internet company spent its last quarter as a public company putting up numbers that showed some promise. The company said Tuesday (April 18) that its unadjusted earnings were up 125 percent to $0.18 a share — in the March period.

Numbers 46
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The Rise Of Payments Laundering

PYMNTS

Getting paid is a worker’s number one priority — including the fraudster. And that’s why they have turned to alternative payments as a way to both get paid and elude the traps that fraud detection systems have put up to find them. With that new focus also comes the rise of the payment hustler — a new breed of fraudster that deals in illicit products of services, typically operates online and has progressed from transaction laundering to payments laundering in the pursuit to get paid from their i

Banking 45
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Doing More With Less: The Modern Finance Miracle

Speaker: Mark Gilham, FCCA, CPP

Finance used to be the function that counted, now it's the one that’s counted on. 📊 For accounting firms, controllers, and finance leaders, expectations are rising faster than headcount. Businesses want agile forecasts, granular analysis, seamless reporting, and smart automation—often without added resources while demanding uncompromised accuracy and compliance.

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Passwords: End Of An Error

PYMNTS

In an age where consumers turn to the internet for everything from banking to commerce to health care, bill pay and social interaction, password security best practices seem like a no-brainer. Despite handling sensitive data and processes in online channels, passwords remain a notable weak spot across internet users. The typical consumer has been found to maintain 27 different logins.

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Hotel Card Data Breach Hits 1,200 US Locations

PYMNTS

InterContinental Hotel Group, the U.K.-based hospitality group which owns and operates brands like Crown Royale and Holiday Inn, recently reported finding malware in 1,200 of its U.S. franchise hotel locations. The malware looks to have been designed to steal guests’ payment card information. The breach, which reportedly could have affected cards left at the front desk between September and the end of December 2016, came to light after card networks warned the hotels that unauthorized charges ha

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The Data Differentiator In Compliance

PYMNTS

Banks and financial institutions spend billions of dollars to ensure they are meeting compliance requirements and properly managing risks. But is all the money being invested really getting the job done? Despite a compliance market packed with providers and the investment from companies to ensure they stay on the right side of regulations, instances of money laundering and fraud are still prevalent and not going anywhere any time soon.

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Alibaba Tracker: Going Global

PYMNTS

It’s been awhile since our last edition of Alibaba tracker, and a great deal has happened since then. There’s a lot to get through, so hold on to your proverbial hats! First up: no showers, just flowers for Alibaba (BABA) shares in April. The company continues its steady year-to-date progress into spring. Since the ball dropped, BABA has seen net gains of 27.24 percent.

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Tariffs on the Table: How to Brief the Board and C‑Suite With Confidence

“What should we do about the tariffs?” There’s no straightforward answer — every leader has a different expectation. CFOs want numbers. COOs want action. CEOs want strategy. And supply chain and procurement leaders need to be ready with the right response — fast. That’s why GEP has created a simple three-part framework that will help CPOs and CSCOs brief the board and C-suite with clarity and confidence.