Sat.May 19, 2018 - Fri.May 25, 2018

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Privacy Critic Files GDPR Complaints Against Facebook And Google

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As Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect, Facebook privacy critic Max Schrems has filed four complaints over consent required to use online services. The complaints were filed against Facebook — along with its Instagram and WhatsApp services — and against Google ’s Android, TechCrunch reported. “It’s simple: Anything strictly necessary for a service does not need consent boxes anymore,” Schrems wrote in a statement.

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How Much Can Technology Improve Healthcare Payments?

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Among the latest hopes for healthcare payments is blockchain. Touted by observers and industry players as one of the top trends that could impact medical billing and data management for 2018, the technology is increasingly being viewed as part of the path to better efficiency in payments. For instance, ConnectingCare , a company that helps far-flung practitioners view patient data across different points of care, wants to use blockchain for cost forecasting and to enable direct pay options for h

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HPS Builds API For FinTechs To Connect To Banks

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Payments software company HPS is launching an API for other FinTech innovators to integrate into banking systems. The company announced news on Monday (May 21) that its PowerCARD Connect-Open API aims to help FinTech developers integrate mobile payment, tokenization, biometrics and other emerging banking technologies into their own solutions. The rollout follows a pilot version of the API launched last year, HPS noted, adding that the API can support “servicing” and “transacting,” enabling push

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Hy-Vee’s First Wahlburgers Restaurant Opens In Minnesota

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Hy-Vee amps up its partnership with the Wahlberg brothers by opening its first Wahlburgers restaurant at the Mall of America in Minnesota. The opening comes as Hy-Vee plans to open another 25 restaurants over the next few years, The Star Tribune reported. Hy-Vee Chief Executive Randy Edeker was not initially interested in the partnership. “But I promised him I’d consider it,” Edeker told the newspaper.

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Why Tech-Forward Tax and Accounting Firms Have the Inside Track to the Future

Speaker: Joe Wroblewski, Sales Engineer Manager

Automating time-consuming manual tasks can save your firm hundreds of hours–and thousands of dollars. But it can also have longer-lasting benefits, like helping you attract and retain the next generation of CPAs, and we don’t need to tell you how important that is amid the current generational staffing crisis in the tax and accounting profession. You'll want to save your seat for this new webinar with industry expert Joe Wroblewski, where we'll explore how to: Maximize ROI with Cost-Effective Te

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FBI Says Russian Hackers Have Compromised Routers

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U.S. authorities said Friday (May 25) that Russian hackers had “compromised hundreds of thousands of home and office routers and could collect user information or shut down network traffic,” according to a report from Reuters. The new follows warnings earlier this week about a potential massive cyberattack timed to a soccer match in the Ukraine. The Federal Bureau of Investigation encouraged consumers to turn their routers off and then back on to protect against hacking and to “download updates

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The Future Of Augmented Reality Is Becoming Clearer

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Recent moves from PayPal and Target have brought fresh attention to the use of augmented reality (AR) to boost commerce and payments. The technology remains in its infant stage — with seemingly as many ideas and demonstrations as real-world applications — but the paths to an augmented reality future are becoming clearer. The revival this spring of PayPal’s patent for payment-enabled augmented reality glasses has some analysts wondering how close the technology is moving toward the mainstream.

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Chip-Enabled Merchants Reach 2.9M In U.S.

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Visa announced that the growing number of chip cards and chip-enabled merchants has helped bring counterfeit fraud in the U.S. down by 76 percent. “Visa set the path for the U.S. payments industry to begin the shift to EMV chip cards in 2011,” the company wrote in a press release. “One of the leading factors was that chip technology is extremely effective in reducing counterfeit fraud, which was the leading type of fraud in the U.S. at the time.”.

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Was A Massive Cyberattack Just Prevented?

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is dismantling a “large network of hacked routers and storage devices” that could have enabled a “massive cyberattack ,” according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The FBI move came after Cisco Systems Inc. and authorities from the United States and the Ukraine warned about the prospect of the gear facilitating an attack that could “knock hundreds of thousands of internet users offline,” according to the report.

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Flywire Expands With New London HQ

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Flywire , a provider of global payment and receivables solutions, has announced a major expansion of its U.K. and European operations and team. The company has moved to Folgate Street in London’s Spitalfields District, into a new office space that is quadruple the size of its previous location in Canary Wharf. Flywire processes billions of dollars in payments around the world each year.

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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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Coupa: How CFOs Become Chief Business Drivers

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CFO. Chief financial officer , of course. But might we tweak the title a bit? Maybe to “chief fundamentals officer?” The fundamentals of business is what we’re talking about here: Stretching across everything from external forces, such as competition, to internal workings spanning expense management to communications to defining and spearheading strategy that can change with haste.

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TRENDING: Inside GDPR’s Enforcement Strategies

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Cyberattacks on American financial institutions are at an all-time high, with more and more cybercriminals eyeing consumers’ financial data and other sensitive information. A February 2018 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that 75 percent of American financial institutions incurred losses due to fraud last year. And with that, governments and security solution providers are stepping into the fray with the aim of combatting fraudsters.

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Blockchain: Payments Execs Unpack The Hope From The Hype

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Remember when blockchain was the new technology buzzword on the … block? Still buzzy, if not so new in the nomenclature. Now blockchain is on everyone’s lips, and has been for a while. Where once the concept of the digital ledger was linked to bitcoin , now blockchain stands on its own, as a conduit to any number of transactions across cryptocurrencies and other vessels of exchange, including data.

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Chase Launches Ink Business Unlimited Credit Card

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Chase announced news on Tuesday (May 22) that it is launching Ink Business Unlimited, a new credit card geared toward small business owners that gives them unlimited 1.5 percent cash back on purchases. In a press release, Chase said Chase Ink Business Unlimited rewards business owners on every purchase without requiring them to make purchases in special categories.

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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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Corporate Treasurers On The Lookout For FinTech, PSD2 And Brexit

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Corporate treasurers gathered for the Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT) annual conference last week, and there, treasury professionals made clear where their priorities stand today. At the top of the list, according to reports, is incoming FinTech disruption, legislation like PSD2, market shifts stemming from Brexit and more. According to reports in Global Finance , an estimated 1,100 corporate treasurers from across the U.K. and Europe gathered for the conference.

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Estonia Sees $13B In Money Laundering Over Four Years

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After reports of money laundering caused lenders in Estonia and Latvia to close, police said on Friday (May 25) that more than $13 billion (or about €11 billion) was laundered through banks in Estonia between 2012 and 2016. Much of the money was reportedly laundered through bank accounts belonging to non-residents, Reuters reported. “In 2012, more than €7.3 billion in securities from Russia were processed through the Estonian financial system.

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Vocalink: How To Stop Fraud In The Era Of Real-Time Payments

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As the speed of payments increases around the world, the potential scope of fraud shifts to targets beyond cards. Criminals are taking advantage of the global spread of real-time digital transactions to con chief financial officers, invoice managers and the like, hoping to steal massive sums before anyone knows they’ve been ripped off. That is among the themes of a recent discussion that Karen Webster had with two fraud experts from Vocalink , the Mastercard -owned payment company that powers re

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WePay: Contextual Is The Future Of Commerce

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In 10 years, no one will talk about “contextual commerce” — it’ll just be commerce. That’s what Rich Aberman, co-founder of WePay , predicts. Native commerce is where Aberman believes all platforms are headed — and that’s not just true for software developers like Apple, Google and Microsoft, but also for social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

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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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Bringing A New Social Context To eCommerce

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Though the idea of contextual commerce is widely loved, delivering on it is a significant challenge. As it turns out, finding the right context — a moment when a customer is perfectly primed to buy a good or service, if only someone would give them an easy way to do it — is not as easy as simply declaring something a good context for commerce. For example, the rocky launch of the eCommerce chatbot over the last year has proven this problem.

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Independent Restaurants Increase Spending With Suppliers

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The number of independent restaurants continues to decline in the United States, but they still make up more than half of the country’s eateries, and account for 15 percent of total restaurant operator spend. That’s according to research released on Monday (March 21) by The NPD Group. The research firm said that “while the number of independent restaurant units in the U.S. dropped by 3 percent, 346,105 independent restaurants remained opened, which represents over half of the 647,288 commercial

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The Automotive Aftermarket Eyes Its Digital Future

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The experiment did not work out for AutoZone. The retailer of aftermarket automotive parts had tried offering “aggressive promotional discounts” for items ordered online and then shipped to consumers’ homes, according to CEO William Rhodes — a nod to how eCommerce is changing customer expectations. The discount program, while only a small part of the chain’s overall revenue mix, had a “negative impact on our sales, which also negatively impacted our overall same-store sales,” he said on Tuesday

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Fundbox Links With Eventbrite For Events Financing

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Small business invoice financing platform Fundbox is targeting the events industry through a new partnership with Eventbrite. A press release late last week said Fundbox is integrating its solution into the Eventbrite platform to link event creators with access to credit. According to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics cited in Fundbox’s announcement, the event industry is slated to grow 44 percent between 2010 and 2020.

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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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Sensory CEO On How Voice Recognition Is Growing Up

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The ideal goes something like this: Consumers at any location — a friend’s house, a car — could speak into a voice assistant or smart speaker and be instantly recognized by the device no matter who owns it. That consumer could make secure transactions or add items to a daily calendar or perform any of the other tasks possible in a world where voice recognition has become ubiquitous.

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Sodyo’s Vision For The Next-Gen QR Code

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What if QR Codes could transition consumers seamlessly between the online and offline worlds, blurring the lines between physical and digital retail, and ingraining shopping as part of the everyday experience? They can’t, but the next generation of scannable codes aims to do exactly that, leveraging a color matrix that can be scanned from afar and renders well on TV screens.

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How Data And AI Are Changing The Real Estate Game

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Are the days of the real estate agent numbered? Probably not — no matter what, someone has to put out cookies and snacks for potential home buyers — but artificial intelligence is taking more command in the industry. The latest evidence comes from SetSchedule , a real estate data analytics and marketing firm. It recently announced its launch of a service called SetValue, which the company describes as a “tool that is the first of its kind to combine data analytics and artificial intelligence and

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Adobe To Aquire Magento Commerce For $1.68B

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Adobe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce for $1.68 billion, subject to adjustments. The addition of the Magento Commerce Cloud will enable commerce to seamlessly integrate into the Adobe Experience Cloud, and delivers one platform that serves both B2B and B2C customers around the world, Adobe said in an announcement.

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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.