The Business And Technology Network

ViaBTC auctioned off an ‘epic sat’ associated with the fourth Bitcoin halving block for 33.3 BTC ($2.13 million) on April 25.

Wyndham Hotels & Resorts is developing a record-high number of rooms amid its anticipation of a healthy summer season.

The hotel chain released earnings Thursday (April 25) showing it has 243,000 rooms in its development pipeline, an 8% increase year-over-year, primarily at the company’s “midscale and above” properties.

Management said Wyndham is targeting higher-end properties in the wake of Choice Hotels’ failed $7.8 billion takeover bid, which ended last month.

“I would say actively we are certainly pushing into higher chain scales … but we will always be looking to lead in the economy segment,” said CEO Geoff Ballotti.

Asked during an earnings call about Wyndham’s anticipation for the summer travel season, the chief executive noted there is some “concern” about middle-income guest traffic weighing on the company.

“But what we’re seeing is that that middle-income guest is more employed, and we look at their wages and their savings, it’s they’re higher than they were back in pre COVID levels,” Ballotti said. “Their home prices are up, their stocks are up, their deposit levels are stable and they’re in good shape.” 

Consumer confidence is growing too, he added, with the company seeing longer lengths of stay.

“Booking windows, we look at daily, and they continue to tick up. We talked about our trends looking out to Memorial Day weekend and into May,” said Ballotti. “But our booking windows are similarly up 7% to last year from 19 to 21 days now.”

Recent research and reporting by PYMNTS shows that the travel sector may have cause for optimism this summer.

Younger and more affluent shoppers are showing resilience when it comes to spending on travel and other experiences, a trend that recently led American Express to note that Generation Z and millennial consumers made up the bulk of its new accounts. Spending on travel and entertainment was up 8% during the credit card company’s most recent quarter.

Meanwhile, toymakers Hasbro and Mattel both recently reported a decline in revenue from their consumer product divisions as people turn their income toward experiences.

“During times of economic uncertainty, consumers may turn to experiences as a means of seeking comfort, stress relief, and escape from everyday worries,” PYMNTS wrote earlier this week. “This could lead to increased spending on experiences that provide emotional fulfillment and relaxation, such as dining out, vacations, or attending concerts and events, even if shoppers need to cut back on spending on products to afford these.”

The post Wyndham Expects Consumer Confidence to Fuel Summer Travel appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Dutch payments firm Adyen saw its digital processed volume leap 51% year over year during the first three months of 2024.

This happened during a quarter in which the company’s total processed volume rose 46% year over year, Adyen said in a business update released Thursday (April 25).

Adyen attributed the rise in digital processed volume to the expansion of an unnamed existing digital customer as well as accelerated volume from other large enterprise merchants, according to the business update.

“We think that we offer a premium proposition, and we price for that,” Ethan Tandowsky, chief financial officer at Adyen, said Thursday during the company’s quarterly earnings call. “I think it is really a strong proof point that these customers are willing to expand wallet share with us and bring more of their business onto the Adyen platform.”

Together with digital, Adyen saw broad-based growth across its other businesses as well, Tandowsky said.

Adyen’s unified commerce processed volume grew 30% year over year in the first quarter, with point-of-sale (POS) volumes growing faster than eCommerce volumes “as consumer expectations increasingly turned towards hybrid physical and digital experiences,” per the business update.

The company’s platforms processed volume jumped 55% year over year. Adyen said in the business update that this growth was driven by the addition of 58,000 platform business customers over the past 12 months, bringing the total number to 96,000, and a “growing appetite for platforms from both enterprises and SMBs.”

“In terms of new verticals and new markets that could be unlocked by a lower take rate, here we really look at, ‘Is payments strategic for an industry?’ I think over time we’ve seen that payments has become more strategic for more industries, even breaking into things like everyday retail,” Tandowsky said during the call.

Looking ahead, Adyen expects its annual net revenue growth up to an including 2026 to be between the low twenties and high twenties percent, according to the business update.

“Our growth thus far is in line with our expectation for the full year, and it gives us the confidence that we’re on track to meet that low end of the guidance range,” Tandowsky said during the call.

The post Adyen Reports Digital Transactions Rise 51% as Enterprises Increase Volume appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

Innovation is a key factor in any company’s ability to succeed in the long run. 

And so are the ways in which they pay and get paid. That’s why, within the B2B payments landscape, innovation plays a crucial role in enabling businesses to streamline processes, reduce costs, mitigate risks and enhance the overall efficiency and effectiveness of their payment operations. 

As technology continues to advance, we can expect further innovations to reshape the way B2B payments are conducted, ultimately driving global commerce to new heights.

That’s why PYMNTS continues to track the latest advances shaping the B2B landscape.

The top themes we heard this week were about how the incentive around transitioning to digital B2B payments is changing, particularly around the use of virtual cards by both buyers and suppliers.

But that’s not all — this week also revealed that firms are increasingly tasking automation and artificial intelligence (AI) with the accounting tasks humans no longer want to do, and also spotlighted a new crop of innovative solutions focused on making life easier for small businesses.

The Winning Calculus Around Going Digital

Financial institutions have a unique opportunity to bolster the resilience of small businesses by providing tailored financial tools and support, NCR Voyix Chief Product Officer, Digital Banking Doug Brown said in the new PYMNTS eBook, “The Implications of Uncertainty.”

And as the drumbeat of announcements this week showed, small businesses are being celebrated with a suite of new digital solutions. 

Loan origination platform Decipher Credit on Monday (April 22) teamed up with small business financial data provider Validis. The partnership will allow commercial lenders to extract financial and accounts receivable data in real-time, letting small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) go from “application to automated spreading” in seconds.

Margin multiplier company Coupa has launched a partnership with business payments provider Bottomline. The collaboration, announced Monday, is designed to simplify digital payment processes for businesses.

On Wednesday (April 24), card issuing platform Marqeta launched a partnership with digital bank OakNorth to offer small businesses commercial cards.

Also on Wednesday, PYMNTS sat down with Shilpa Dhar, senior vice president and general manager of commerce at HubSpot, to chat about HubSpot’s new partnership with Stripe focused on optimizing digital payments for small businesses.

Read more: Workflow Automation, Flexible Financing Top This Week in B2B Innovation

And according to a recent panel discussion of industry heavyweights that featured Robin Boudsocq, head of B2B Commercial Cards at Citi; Jennifer Petty, global card and comprehensive payables executive at Bank of America; Chad Wallace, executive vice president of B2B Solutions at Mastercard; and Paul Christensen, founder and CEO of Previse, virtual cards are emerging as a source of payments certainty — for both buyers and suppliers. 

“There are trillions of dollars that are going to move to virtual cards in the next two, three, four, five years,” the panelists said.

The widespread adoption of electronic payments has transformed the financial landscape, with cash gradually becoming obsolete in many sectors.

“Where the big pockets still exist tend to be in the B2B realm. … But I don’t think it’s a hard sell to anybody at this point, the benefits of going electronic,” Jim McCarthy, CEO at Thredd, told PYMNTS on Thursday. 

Automating Away the Growing Account Shortage 

Observers believe the amount of time and effort required to pass the CPA exam, combined with a relatively stale level of income growth for entry-level positions, is having a ruinous impact on Generation Z’s accounting ambitions — particularly when they look at the starting salary for Wall Street and Silicon Valley roles.

In 2023 alone, over 720 companies cited insufficient staffing levels across key financial and accounting departments and noted that the lack of help meant there could be potential errors in their reporting.

And the situation is only more dire for smaller businesses where the loss of even one accountant is felt much more sharply across finance teams. 

That’s why PYMNTS reported on how, as the reality of scarce labor resources settles in for firms’ accounting departments, a surprising solution could be on the horizon: embracing automation and investing in innovation, including AI. 

But the marketplace is already responding with new innovations. On Tuesday (April 23), accounting and human resources and finance firm Countsy debuted an online platform designed to simplify back-office management by providing a centralized place for essential business tools and team collaboration.

And a day earlier, on Monday, Microsoft and Cognizant a new partnership to expand the adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solutions by enterprises. 

Jumping With Two Feet Into the Digital B2B Space 

FinTech industry customers are no longer asking just for ways to accept online payments. Nowadays, they want “software-defined financial services.”

That’s according to Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison, who made the remarks during an opening keynote of the company’s annual user conference on Wednesday in San Francisco.

Those services could even be coming to the metaverse.

On Monday, Meta announced it would be opening the operating system Horizon OS up to third-party hardware makers. The system powers the company’s Meta Quest metaverse headsets. The move includes a partnership with Lenovo focused on enabling greater enterprise productivity within the metaverse. 

That’s why PYMNTS unpacked how, as businesses around the world begin to explore the possibilities offered by Horizon OS and the broader mixed reality (MR) landscape, we are likely to see a significant transformation in how work is conducted. The ability to blend physical and digital workspaces seamlessly, enhance collaboration among remote teams and visualize complex data in intuitive ways are just a few examples of how mixed reality can revolutionize enterprise productivity.

Miscellaneous Market Moves 

On Sunday (April 24), instant money movement platform TabaPay announced its acquisition Synapse’s assets following the latter company’s bankruptcy.

On Tuesday, Standard Chartered partnered with Visa to facilitate cross-border B2B payments for the bank’s corporate clients, while cross-border payments platform Nium and payments processor Thredd have expanded their partnership, allowing Nium to issue virtual cards in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

At the same time, Uber for Business designed a new tool to make it easier for executive assistants to arrange corporate travel, the social economy platform announced Wednesday.

The post This Week in B2B: Enterprise Metaverses, AI Accountants, Virtual Cards appeared first on PYMNTS.com.

For Fossil, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

When Fossil announced it was leaving the Android smartwatch space, I wasn’t surprised. The signs had been there for a while. What I didn’t expect was how sad it made me feel. Fossil’s smartwatches had never been the best. Their battery life was meh, health tracking could be iffy, and before Wear OS 3, the company was often let down by Google’s neglect. But now that Fossil has called it quits, it’s left a massive vacuum in the Wear OS ecosystem. Who, if anyone, can fill that void? Is there even a point when Google and Samsung dominate that space?

It’s been a few months, and I’m still not sure there’s a real answer.

Throughout Wear OS’s dark days — back when it was Android Wear, even — Fossil soldiered on. It continued to make…

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Looking back on a decade of coverage.

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Worldcoin saw nearly 5.1 million sign-ups across 120 countries for users scanning their irises in exchange for the cryptocurrency WLD. 

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3–2 to restore net neutrality rules, reversing a repeal ushered through during the Trump administration.

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should not be able to discriminate against different kinds of content by blocking or throttling connection speeds or offering paid prioritization for different internet traffic. The FCC has sought to accomplish this by reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, giving the agency more regulatory authority over them.

Democratic FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in remarks ahead of the vote that internet access went from a “nice to have, to need to have.” She added that, “Broadband is now an…

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