In this week’s news, we saw a report that Coinbase will be going public in April instead of this month, in addition to new insights on the digital shift for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and real-time payments (RTP). The Weekender is here to catch you up.
News
Coinbase’s IPO Gets Pushed To April
Coinbase will now reportedly go public in April instead of March. The firm’s plans for a direct listing instead of a traditional initial public offering (IPO) are reportedly being looked over by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Google Pay Exec Caesar Sengupta Plans April Exit
Google payments executive Caesar Sengupta is stepping down from Google following about 15 years at the company.
GameStop Digital Sales Spike For Q4; Moves To Be ‘Customer-Obsessed Tech Company’
GameStop posted a 175 percent jump in its worldwide eCommerce sales. CEO George Sherman said on GameStop’s earnings conference call that the company is “focused on transforming into a customer-obsessed technology company that delights gamers.”
Peloton’s Deals Deluge Shows Its Aspirations To Be Digital Front Door
Peloton‘s aggressive round of new acquisitions reveal a company working overtime to grow up and into its hype from its role as a connected device manufacturer into a new position as a “digital front door” to a connected commerce ecosystem fueled by payments.
What Consumers Say About The Reopening Of The Physical World — And What It Means For Business
PYMNTS explores why most Americans still think it will take until this time in 2021 — March 2022 — before a return to the physical world as they left it in March 2020 is probable.
Trackers And Reports
Digital Features Drive Global SMBs’ Digital Shift
SMBs will have to double down on their efforts to bolster digital offerings if they want to maintain relevancy in a world in which many consumers have migrated to digital and mobile shopping — and have evolved to anticipate the simplicity and safety connected with it.
NPP Australia Takes Real-Time Payments To The Next Level
Australia’s real-time payment system has greatly expanded since its 2018 rollout. At that time, the New Payments Platform (NPP) was just concentrated on helping with retail and peer-to-peer (P2P) payments.
PYMNTS explores how the NPPA has taken in active role in supporting new uses cases, what it will take to attain real-time push payments and global transactions and what the NPPA has learned since the real-time payment system’s rollout.
The Multichannel Guide To Boosting Digital Wallet Adoption
Heightened consumer adoption of digital and mobile wallets provides payors in various areas with the chance to harness these wallets as disbursement endpoints. PYMNTS explores the evolving digital and mobile wallet environment in regions throughout the globe in addition to the chances for companies to harness these safe digital endpoints for disbursements liquidity.
Fun, Cool And Otherwise Interesting
New Data; Restaurant’s Post-Pandemic Future Sees ‘First Returners’ In Key Role
Older consumers are the most enthusiastic about going back to on-site dining, with 68 percent of baby boomers and seniors and 56 percent of Generation X consumers noting a desire to dine out with greater frequency.
Bank Of America Analysts See ‘No Good Reason’ To Own Bitcoin
To the analysts at Bank of America, bitcoin is really only a speculative investment without any real hallmarks that make it suitable for broad use. There’s “no good reason” to own bitcoin “unless you see prices going up,” the bank’s analysts wrote.
Imperfect Foods’ Three-Pronged Approach To Net-Zero By 2030
Imperfect Foods has vowed to attain net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. “Our entire business has been designed around eliminating food waste,” Madeline Rotman, head of sustainability at the company, told PYMNTS in a recent interview. “And as we take that mission inward, we keep asking ourselves, ‘What more can we do to build a better food system?’”
Fed Chair Powell Remarks Draw Brighter Line Between Cryptos, Digital Dollars
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell made comments this week that seem to place digital currencies — the kind not pegged to an underlying asset, or to fiat — flat in the space of speculative instrument.
“They’re highly volatile and therefore not really useful stores of value and they’re not backed by anything,” the chairman said in a digital panel discussion, as per a published report.
SPAC CEO: Blank Check Listings Help FinTechs with Growth ‘Inflection Point’
Amanda Abrams, CEO of FinTech Masala, CEO of FTAC Acquisition Corp. and managing director at Cohen and Co., told PYMNTS that special purpose acquisition companies (SPAC) could assist quickly-expanding, smaller companies obtain the capital they need to flourish.
Abrams said that there have been, and still remain, many FinTechs that began in the past several years — a number of them going back to the early 2000s — that are quickly expanding and are at what she called “an inflection point” where an infusion of funding could take them to the next level in their life cycles.
