Last week, today, May 3: News in payments and fintech

Our bi-weekly news roundup collects some of the headlines in payments and fintech to watch, giving leaders across industries (or fintech enthusiasts) a quick glance at some of the news in the space. In Flywire’s 10+ years in delivering the most complex, high value payments, we’ve had a unique opportunity to work with many different organizations in the fintech and payments ecosystem. We’ve seen changes in how clients get paid, how their customers want to pay and how central the payments experience has become – not just across the industries we focus on, but every industry.

Here are some of the fintech and payments headlines from April 20 through May 3.

Headlines

Checks Are the Top Vehicle for Commercial Payments Fraud - Payments Journal
Some 66% of the organizations surveyed by Mercator Advisory Group have experienced actual or attempted check fraud. In its report, The Cost of Fraud: B2B Payments Experience 10% Increase During the Pandemic, the firm explores the impact of fraud in the B2B payments space.

JPMorgan reorganizes its tech teams to nurture ‘that lean, startup kind of mindset’ - Insider Intelligence
JPMorgan’s IT teams will reorganize along product lines, including the addition of 25 “mini-CEOs” who will each lead their share of the bank’s 50,000 technologists “like heads of startups.”

166M US Consumers Are Amazon Prime Members - PYMNTS.com
Most Americans subscribe to a membership service with a mass retailer such as Amazon Prime, Costco, Sam’s Club or Walmart+. But Amazon Prime leads the way with an estimated 166M members. That’s more than double that of each of the three other mass merchants.

Survey finds incumbent banks at a crossroads, losing customers to agile fintechs - Insider Intelligence
Aging IT infrastructure and data silos hold back retail banks from better serving their customers. It’s one of the findings from the latest World Retail Banking Report, “The Customer Engagement Imperative: What Banks Can Learn from the Fintech Playbook.” Capgemini and Efma surveyed 8,051 consumers and 142 banking executives in 29 different countries.

Brazil among countries with the most real-time payment transactions - Valor Econômico
Brazil landed at No. 4 on the list of companies with the most real-time payment transactions, following India, China and Thailand in that order. The country jumped four positions compared to 2020.

Financial Technology Firms Tap AI to Reach More Borrowers - Wall Street Journal
Fintech lenders are feeding a wider range of data into AI-powered platforms to present a broader picture of applicants beyond credit scores.

From Flywire

Transforming the patient financial experience - 4 best practices
There are steps that any hospital or health system can take to be more successful in their patient pay efforts. Flywire EVP & GM John Talaga talks about this and more.

How to find machine learning use cases that create business value
Finding business-relevant use cases can be a major impediment to applying machine learning in a thoughtful way. At first glance, building a Wordle bot may not seem super relevant in that regard. But it is – Flywire Principal Data Scientist Chad Lieberman explains why.

This Earth Day, how Flymates support our planet
Flywire isn’t only focused on building better payments experiences. In celebration of Earth Day 2022, we singled out a few Flymates who are taking everyday steps to build a better, more sustainable planet.

Let’s talk about execution
Hear from two of our FlyMates about the value of one of our core values –“Execution.”

Flywire in the news: 150 top places to work in healthcare
Becker’s Healthcare placed Flywire on its "150 Top Places to Work in Healthcare | 2022" list, which highlights hospitals, health systems and healthcare companies that promote diversity within the workforce, employee engagement and professional growth.

Flywire in the news: 9 purposeful approaches to remote hiring
Laura Ladd, Flywire’s Senior Manager of Global Talent Acquisition, talked with BuiltinBoston about how Flywire has succeeded with remote hiring and onboarding.

Stat of the week

14% - The percentage of technologists Fidelity plans to hire by the end of the third quarter as part of its recruitment of 12,000 new employees, according to Dice: “Fidelity is on a technologist hiring spree, like other fintech companies.”

Report of the week

CFOs conservative on spending, bullish on business - NetSuite Brainyard
The NetSuite CFO & Business Leader Spring 2022 Outlook Survey took the pulse of the finance department, asked CFOs about how the job has changed over the past three years, and even asked peer executives to rate their CFOs (who got high marks).

Conversation starter

Financing a healthy future for coral reefs - Wall Street Journal
Financial innovation is playing a role in protecting coral reefs – which generate some $2.7 trillion in economic value among their role in fostering food sources, providing recreation and serving as protection from storms. This includes new types of insurance policies and ‘debt for nature’ swaps.