Dear Subscriber,

In this newsletter, it’s all about resignations, payment acceleration, and accelerators. Visa’s CEO, Charlie Scharf has resigned and will be replaced by Alfred Kelly, former president of American Express. First Data has released a new contactless payment reader that processes EMV transactions in 3.5 seconds, and Mastercard and Silicon Valley Bank have selected six new startups for Class 5 of its Commerce.Innovated. accelerator.

Elsewhere in the newsletter, a comprehensive white paper from payments testing experts at Iliad Solutions explains the problems with the current payments testing regime, how to address them and how organisations can benefit as a result.

Enjoy!

When RBS suffered a payments failure last year, we witnessed exactly how a serious disruption to service can have an impact on customer trust, company reputation, and share price. How can financial organisations mitigate the risk of having a similar incident?

Silicon Valley Bank and Mastercard have selected six new startups for their fifth class of Commerce.Innovated, a virtual accelerator designed to help commerce, payments and fintech startups grow their businesses.

Charlie Scharf has this week announced his resignation from the post of Visa’s chief executive officer. It come into effect on December 1st 2016.

First Data has released Clover Go, a new contactless payment reader that works with swipe and EMV cards, as well as NFC (including Apple Pay, Android Pay & Samsung Pay) devices.