Tag: payments

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China’s Alipay adds sought-after beauty filters to face-scan payments

In China, striving for accuracy in a piece of facial recognition software isn’t enough. As Alibaba’s e-wallet affiliate Alipay has recently demonstrated, the way software presents a user’s look is also crucial to its success.

On Tuesday, Alipay announced on social media platform Weibo (in Chinese) that it’s added beauty filters to its pay-with-face system inside the app. Within a week, the feature will roll out across retail stores equipped with Alipay’s face-scanning solutions.

“We are going to make you look even prettier than with a beauty camera. I bet you’ll be impressed,” Alipay wrote on Weibo.

The new feature was created to address complaints that facial recognition machines make people look ugly. A new poll (in Chinese) ran by news portal Sina Technology showed that more than 60% of respondents think they look uglier through the next-gen payments method than on a regular camera. This could be a real concern for beauty-obsessed people who, at a busy supermarket checkout, find their face displayed unflatteringly on a large computer screen.

The chase of beauty in China has spawned a handful of movers and shakers in the internet space, from Hong Kong-listed selfie-app maker Meitu to plastic surgery marketplace Soyoung that recently raised $180 million from a Nasdaq public listing.

Will WeChat Pay, the payments solution of messaging giant WeChat, follows Alipay’s shadow to build a similar offering? Beauty filters can be a competitive advantage to a business, if not a necessity. In an effort to draw more female users, smartphone maker Xiaomi recently joined hands with Meitu to develop new models that place more focus on selfies, stickers and graphics.

Alipay boasts more than one billion monthly active users of late. WeChat doesn’t break out the number for its payments segment but said in March the service processed more than one billion daily transactions.

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Kyash, a would-be challenger bank in Japan, raises $14M

The new era of tech-enabled banks is coming, even in regulation-heavy Japan. Kyash, a fintech company with visions on becoming Japan’s first challenger bank, said today it has raised $14 million to continue its expansion.

To be clear, Kyash isn’t a bank. Yet. But it is currently applying for a host of licenses in Japan that could allow it to offer banking-style features including checking accounts, ATM withdrawals and money remittance. Right now, it is a payment app that offers a connected Visa card in the style of Monzo, N26, Revolut (which has a Japan license) and others of that ilk.

The startup was founded in 2015 in Shinichi Takatori, a former banker and management consultant who saw the potential to merge tech and finance.

“I really noticed that information and communication has become ubiquitous but money itself hasn’t changed for a long time,” Takatori told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company took some time — two years — before it released a consumer product, but it quickly tied up with Visa to offer a prepaid debit card that connects to the Kyash app. That provides benefits like instant payment notifications, clear balance and lower fees for overseas spending, while costs are born by merchants rather than users. They might seem elementary today, but they are still not standard among Japan’s traditional banks, Takatori explained.

The company declined to share its user numbers, but Takatori said that this new round of funding — Kyash’s Series B — is a validation of the progress it has made.

The $14 million investment is co-led by Goodwater Capital, a U.S. investor that has backed fintech startups like Monzo, Stash and Toss in Korea, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, the investment arm of Japan’s largest bank.

Mitsubishi’s involvement means that Kyash counts Japan’s three largest banks as investors, with SMBC, Mizuho having previous put money into the company. Others that took part in this Series B include Toppan Printing, JAFCO and Shinsei Corporate Investment Limited.

So many banks on the cap table might seem like a strange thing for a disruptor — let alone the banks, which tend to behave territorially — but Takatori believes that there’s the potential for cooperation, not to mention that it will help the startup with its licensing efforts. Already, he revealed, Mitsubishi plans to integrate its card with the Kyash app to provide its customers with the best of both worlds.

“We’re not here to win over existing banks, but instead inform [them of] how money should work in next decade,” explained Takatori. “So why not collaborate in some way.”

appcard

Kyash has a tie-up with Visa that allows it to offer its customers a connected debit card and also provide issuing services to other fintech startups

There’s also the fact that, even with a license, Kyash and others are unlikely to be able to offer full banking services. That means they will have to serve as complementary offerings to the industry, which would likely mean that cooperation is good — essential — for both sides.

But, beyond the consumer play, a notable piece of Kyash’s business that has investors excited is its B2B payment business.

The company developed its own payment processing system to reduce costs, which is one reason why it took time to launch. Thanks to a tie-up with Visa, it offers both issuing and processing of prepaid Visa cards to fintech companies in Japan that want to go down the payment route.

That’s increasingly popular given the government push to make the country a “cashless society” ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games next year. It could also appeal to crypto companies in Japan, which offers the world’s most robust licensing, who want to follow the example of the Coinbase card in Europe or startups like Crypto.com and TenX which offer similar prepaid cards.

Takatori said Kyash is “in discussions” with crypto companies, but that it has not made a decision on how to proceed yet. The company is also eying potential overseas expansions, although that is some way down the line.

“We have open eyes for globalization, it’s just a matter of when,” he told TechCrunch. “We still have a far way to go [in Japan, but] maybe after the Olympics.”

More pressingly, he sees the company looking to raise a “pretty quick” Series C round to give it acceleration into next year. That’s likely to go to more expansion and user acquisition since the licenses the startup has applied for are unlikely to be granted this year.

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Uber Eats invades restaurants with Dine-In option

Tired of cleaning up after take-out or getting hangry waiting at your table in restaurants? Well Uber Eats is barging into the dine-in business. A new option in some cities lets you order your food ahead of time, go to the restaurant, and then sit down inside to eat, a tipster from competing dine-in app Allset tells us. We tested it, and Uber Eats Dine-In even waives the standard Uber delivery and service fees.

Adding Dine-In lets Uber Eats insert itself into more food transactions, expand to restaurants that care about presentation and don’t do delivery, and avoid paying drivers while earning low-overhead revenue. Uber’s Dine-In option is now available in some cities including Austin, Dallas, Phoenix and San Diego where it could save diners time and fees while helping restaurants fill empty tables and waiters earn tips.

UberEats Dine In Option

Uber confirmed the existence of the Dine-In option, telling me “We’re always thinking about new ways to enhance the Eats experience.” They also verified there are no delivery or service fees, and restaurants get 100% of tips left in-app buy users. However, we found some items were silently marked up from restaurants’ listed prices in both Uber Eats Delivery and Dine-In options, which could help it make some money directly from these purchases. We also discovered this buried Uber Help Center FAQ with more details.

Uber has been rapidly experimenting with Uber Eats, trying discounted specials, Uber Eats Pool where you pay less for slower delivery, and $9.99 unlimited delivery subscriptions. It’s steadily becoming an omnivore.

How Uber Dine-In Works

Dine-in appears next to the Delivery and Pick-Up options across the top of the Uber Eats app in select cities. You can choose to go eat “ASAP” or in some cases schedule when you want to arrive and sit down. You’ll be shown how long the food will take to prep, distance to the restaurant, your price, and the restaurant’s rating. You’ll then be notified as the order is prepared and approaches readiness. Then you just deliver yourself to the restaurant and add a tip in-app or on the table.

Uber Eats should obviously make it easy for you to hail an Uber with the restaurant as the pre-set destination. An Uber spokesperson called that a good idea but not something it’s doing yet. Back in 2016, Uber tried a merchant-sponsored rides option where you’d get a rebate on your travel if you spent money at a given store. You could imagine restaurants that want to show off their ambiance giving customers some money back if they come across town to eat there.

Uber Dine In

The new feature could spell trouble for other dine-in apps like Allset that’s been in the business for four years. Users might also opt for Uber Eats Dine-In over restaurant reservation apps like OpenTable and Resy. Why waste time waiting to order and for your food to be cooked when you could just show up as it comes out of the oven?

“I think that more delivery players will be tapping into dine-in space. It’s all about convenience and time saving. But it’s going to be very difficult for them, given their focus on delivery” AllsetCEO Stas Matviyenko said of Uber becoming a competitor. He believes dedicated apps for different modes of dining will succeed. But Uber Eats’ ubiquity and its one-stop-shop model for all your dining needs could make it stickier than a dine-in only app you use less frequently.

UberEatsheader

With Dine-In, Uber could aid restaurants that are empty at the start or end of their open hours. Last year we reported that Uber Eats was giving restaurants prominence in a Featured section of the app to drive up demand if they offered discounts to customers. Similarly, Uber could let restaurants entice more Dine-In customers especially when foot-traffic was slow by providing discounts on food or subsidized Uber transportation. Better to knock a dollar or two off an entree if it means filling the restaurant at 5:30 or 9:30pm.

And now that Uber Eats does delivery, take-out, and dine-in, it’d make perfect sense to offer traditional restaurant reservations through the app as well. That would pit it directly against OpenTable, Resy, and Yelp. Instead of trying to own a single use case that might only appeal to certain demographics in certain situations, Uber Eats’ strategy is crystallizing: be the app you open whenever you’re hungry.

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300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators

Meme creators have never gotten their fair share. Remixed and reshared across the web, their jokes props up social networks like Instagram and Twitter that pay back none of their ad revenue to artists and comedians. But 300 million monthly user meme and storytelling app Imgur wants to pioneer a way to pay creators per second that people view their content.

Today Imgur announces that it’s raised a $20 million venture equity round from Coil, a micropayment tool for creators that Imgur has agreed to build into its service. Imgur will eventually launch a premium membership with exclusive features and content reserved for Coil subscribers. Users pay Coil a fixed monthly fee, install its browser extension, the Ripple XRP cryptocurrency is used to route assets around, and then Coil pays creators per second that the subscriber spends consuming their content at a rate of 36 cents per hour. Imgur and Coil will earn a cut too, diversifying the meme network’s revenue beyond ads.

Imgur

“Imgur began in 2009 as a gift to the internet. Over the last 10 years we’ve built one of the largest, most positive online communities, based on our core value to ‘give more than we take’” says Alan Schaaf, founder and CEO of Imgur. The startup bootstrapped for its first five years before raising a $40 million Series A from Andreessen Horowitz and Reddit. It’s grown into the premier place to browse ‘meme dumps’ of 50+ funny images and GIFs, as well as art, science, and inspirational tales.

While the new round brings in fewer dollars, Schaaf explains that Imgur raised at a valuation that’s “higher than last time. Our investors are happy with the valuation. This is a really exciting strategic partnership.” Coil founder and CEO Stefan Thomas who was formerly the CTO of cryptocurrency company Ripple Labs will join Imgur’s board. Coil received the money it’s investing in Imgur from Ripple Labs’ Xpring Initiative, which aims to fund proliferation of the Ripple XRP ecosystem, though Imgur received US dollars in the funding deal.

Thomas tells me that “There’s no built in business model” as part of the web. Publishers and platforms “either make money with ads or with subscriptions. The problem is that only works when you have huge scale” that can bring along societal problems as we’ve seen with Facebook. Coil will “hopefully offer a third potential business model for the internet and offer a way for creators to get paid.”

Coil Micropayments

Founded last year, Coil’s $5 per month subscription is now in open beta, and it provides extensions for Chrome and Firefox as it tries to get baked into browsers natively. Unlike Patreon where you pick a few creators and choose how much to pay each every month, Coil lets you browse content from as many creators as you want and it pays them appropriately. Sites like Imgur can code in tags to their pages that tell Coil’s Web Monetization API who to send money to.

The challenge for Imgur will be avoiding the cannibalization of its existing content to the detriment of its non-paying users who’ve always known it to be free. “We’re in the business of making the internet better. We do not plan on taking anything away for the community” Schaaf insists. That means it will have to recruit new creators and add bonus features that are reserved for Coil subscribers without making the rest of its 300 million users feel deprived.

It’s surprising thT meme culture hasn’t spawned more dedicated apps. Decade-old Imgur precedes the explosion in popularity of bite-sized internet content. But rather than just host memes like Instagram, Imgur has built its own meme creation tools. If Imgur and Coil can prove users are willing to pay for quick hits of entertainment and creators can be fairly compensated, they could inspire more apps to help content makers turn their passion into a profession…or at least a nice side hustle.

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Indonesia’s KoinWorks raises $12 million to grow its P2P SME lending platform

KoinWorks, an Indonesian startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses secure financial services through its online peer-to-peer platform, has raised $16.5 million SGD ($12 million USD) in a new funding round as money continues to flow in what has become a hot space for investors.

The Series B round for the three-year-old startup was led by EV Growth and Quona Capital . Existing investors — Mandiri Capital Indonesia, Convergence Ventures, Gunung Sewu, Beeblebrox and Quona Capital — also participated in the round, the startup said in a statement. The new round means KoinWorks has raised more than $28.5 million to date.

SMEs have historically struggled with securing loan and other financial services from banks — creating a big opportunity for middlemen lending platforms. KoinWorks operates an online platform that uses machine learning to provide low interest loans to these small and medium sized enterprises. It identifies the businesses that are eligible to make the return eventually and connects them with lenders.

The platform has amassed more than 300,000 users, it claimed. More than 60% of the lenders are millennials and for 70%, it is their first time investment. Willy Arifin, a founder and CEO of KoinWorks said the startup aims to “democratize finance in Indonesia while fostering financial inclusion.”

Surprisingly, KoinWorks raised a bigger amount — $16.5 million (USD) in its Series A round in the second half of last year. Arifin insisted that the round was intentionally oversubscribed, suggesting that the existing shareholders of the startup were unwilling to overly dilute their stake. The new round “does not reflect the true appetite of investors in KoinWorks,” he added.

KoinWorks competes with a number of local startups including Akseleran, Investree, Reksadana, Amartha, and Modalku. It also fights with Funding Societies, which received $25 million last year to expand its business in several Southeast Asian markets. Soon, it will have a new competitor in Validus Capital, which raised $15 million earlier this year and announced its plan to enter Indonesia this quarter.

The new round comes at a time when Indonesia is pushing strict regulatory changes for peer-to-peer lending businesses in an attempt to ensure that the chaos in China does not seep into Indonesia.

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Google Pay expands its integration with PayPal to online merchants

Google and PayPal have been strategic partners for some time. The companies in 2017 announced that PayPal would become a payment method in Android Pay, the service that later rebranded as Google Pay. Last year, users who added PayPal as a payment method on Google Pay could then pay for services like Gmail, YouTube, Google Play, and Google Store purchases via a PayPal option in Google Pay. Now, a similar integration is making its way to online merchants who accept Google Pay on their website or mobile app.

Explains Google, hundreds of millions of customers already have payment methods saved to their Google Account — including in some cases, PayPal, thanks to the 2018 integration.

With this expanded integration, merchants can opt to enable PayPal as a payment method in their own Google Pay integration — something that’s easily done if Google Pay has already been implemented on their site. All that’s required is only a small code change to the list of allowed payment methods. (See below).

At that point forward, any online shopper who wants to check out using Google Pay will have the option of selecting PayPal to make the purchase.

The benefit of this integration for consumers is that they won’t have to sign in to PayPal when they use it through Google Pay, which cuts down the number of steps to take at checkout. That, in turn, can increase conversions. They’ll also have access to PayPal’s Purchase Protection and Return Shipping benefits.

For online merchants who are also PayPal merchants, when a customer selects PayPal through Google Pay, the merchant receives the money in their PayPal Business Account within minutes.

PayPal’s embrace of its one-time competitors like Apple and Google actually began several years ago, and is still gaining ground as the technology platforms better integration its service.

The company began teaming up with rivals like Visa, Mastercard, Apple, Google, Samsung and Walmart, to help it achieve better traction both at point-of-sale in retail stores, and within the popular mobile wallets offered by mobile OS platform makers, Apple, Google, and Samsung. Today, PayPal lives alongside other payment cards — like credit and debit cards — inside these mobile wallets.

For merchants who want to offer a variety of checkout methods, they can add support for the digital wallet platforms themselves, and PayPal simply comes along for the ride.

The PayPal option for Google Pay works in all 24 countries where customers can link a PayPal account to Google Pay,

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PayPal COO Bill Ready to depart at end of 2019

PayPal Chief Operating Officer Bill Ready is leaving the company at the end of the year, PayPal announced via a statement issued on Thursday. The exec had first joined PayPal when it acquired his startup, the payments gateway Braintree back in 2013 for $800 million in cash. He became PayPal’s COO a few years later, in 2016. According to PayPal, Ready is interested in pursuing other entrepreneurial interests outside of the company.

At PayPal, Ready drives product, technology, and engineering, including the customer experiences for PayPal’s consumer and merchant businesses as well as Venmo, Braintree, Paydiant, and Xoom businesses. As COO, he was a senior member of the executive team responsible for helping drive revenue and profit goals for the company.

Prior to this role, he ran global product and engineering at PayPal, where he led the PayPal, Braintree, Venmo and Paydiant teams responsible for end-to-end customer experiences including PayPal One Touch; Pay with Venmo; the redesigned PayPal mobile app; PayPal Commerce; and the expansion of Braintree’s global reach and payment methods.

During his time as COO, PayPal looked beyond being just a checkout button on the web, and made a key decision to strike deals with the likes of with Visa, MasterCard, Apple, Google, Samsung, and Walmart, all of which had earlier been positioned as PayPal’s competitors at point-of-sale in-store and online.

PayPal also acquired iZettle, the Square of Europe; payments solution for marketplaces, Hyperwallet; small business lender Swift Financial; and TIO Networks with the goal of better serving the under-banked North Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck, among others. It invested in cross-border payments specialist PPRO, launched instant transfers to banks, expanded its small business lending, brought Venmo to more online platforms, took OneTouch international, and much more.

The announcement follows this week’s news of a cryptocurrency backed by Facebook called Libra, which counts PayPal as a founding member, among others.

“Since joining PayPal six years ago, I have had the privilege of working alongside many incredibly talented people, and I am proud of what we as a leadership team have accomplished together,” said Bill Ready, in a statement. “The transformative work we are doing has positioned PayPal for success well into the future. I am excited for PayPal’s future and committed to using the coming months to ensure a smooth transition, and support the great team we have at PayPal.”

Ready will work through year-end, and then his duties will be split among other executives.

According to PayPal’s 8-K filing, Ready “will no longer be classified as a Section 16 officer or executive officer of the Company, effective as of July 15, 2019,” and entered a separation agreement with PayPal on July 18, 2019 that will provide severance benefits following his separation date of December 31, 2019.

“Bill will always be an important part of the PayPal story,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO. “The Board and management team are grateful for his many contributions and for the customer focus, product excellence and culture of innovation he has helped to instill over the past six years,” said Schulman. “Bill will continue to work with key partners and our leadership team until the end of the year. I appreciate his commitment to PayPal and its future.”

 

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Calibra wallet won’t launch in Facebook’s biggest market

Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe. The social juggernaut made clear of its ambitions when it said that it wishes to empower more than 1.7 billion people around the world who currently do not have a bank account.

But potentially an equally large group of people would not be able to use Facebook’s new digital payments service when it begins rollout next year.

Responding to queries from TechCrunch, a Calibra spokesperson said that the digital wallet will not be rolling out to a number of markets that have taken a stand against cryptocurrency, or are sanctioned by the United States.

“The Libra Blockchain will be global, but it will be up to custodial wallet providers to determine where they will and will not operate. Calibra won’t be available in US-sanctioned countries or countries that ban cryptocurrencies,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch understands that India, Facebook’s biggest market, is among the list of countries where Calibra does not intend to launch. Additionally, Calibra isn’t going to be available in China, North Korea, and Iran, too, where Facebook does not currently have a presence.

India remains cautious about cryptocurrency. The country’s central bank Reserve Bank of India told the highest court in the nation that it did not want cryptocurrency to spread like “contagion,” citing potential harms. Last month, the nation proposed a bill that would penalize ten year jail sentence to those who “mine, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue, or deal in cryptocurrencies.”

Earlier this week, Facebook said that Calibra will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and through a standalone app. In India, this created some additional confusion as WhatsApp already offers a person-to-person payments service in the nation, called WhatsApp Pay. India is the only market where WhatsApp currently offers its payments service.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that Facebook is committed to the efforts that it has made on WhatsApp Pay, which is built on top of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a three-year-old government-backed payments infrastructure that is driving hundreds of millions of financial transactions in the nation each month.

WhatsApp’s payments service is currently available to one million users in India, and the Facebook -owned instant messaging giant is working with the government for a nation-wide rollout.

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India’s payments firm MobiKwik kick-starts its international ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups

MobiKwik, a mobile wallet app in India that has expanded to add several financial services in recent years, said today it plans to enter international markets as it approaches profitability with the local operation. The company is kick-starting its overseas ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups support.

The 10-year-old firm said it has partnered with DT One, a Singapore-headquartered payments network, to enable international mobile recharge (topping up credit to a mobile account), rewards, and airtime credit services in over 150 nations across some 550 mobile operators. The feature is now live on the app.

The feature is aimed at Indians living overseas and immigrants in India, Upasana Taku, co-founder of MobiKwik told TechCrunch in an interview. Millions of Indians go overseas to pursue education or look for a job. Currently, there is no convenient way for them to either help — or receive help from — their families and friends in India when they need to top up their phones.

Similarly, millions of people come to India in search for a job. The new functionality from MobiKwik will allow their families and friends to top up their mobile credit as well. Taku said there is no processing fee for customers as MobiKwik is absorbing all the overhead expenses.

For MobiKwik, mobile recharge is just the entry point to assess interest from users, Taku added. “This is the first service we are launching. We will eventually add other essential services as well. Mobile recharge will offer us good data points and will help us understand different markets,” she added.

MobiKwik is also studying different regulatory frameworks in overseas markets and holding conversations with stakeholders, she added.

The announcement comes at a time when MobiKwik is inching closer to profitability, a feat unheard of for a mobile wallet app provider in India. The firm, which claims to have grown its revenue by 100% in the last two years, expects to be profitable by this year and go public by 2022. (Interestingly, MobiKwik was looking to raise a big round at $1 billion valuation two years ago — which never happened.)

In the last one year, the firm has expanded to offer financial services such as loans, insurances, and investment advice. MobiKwik competes with a handful of payment services in India including Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay that either support, or fully work on top of a government-backed payment infrastructure called UPI. In April, UPI apps were used to carry out 782 million transactions, according to official figures.

The big numbers have attracted major investors, too. With $285.6 million in funding, India emerged as Asia’s top fintech market in the quarter that ended in March this year.

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Millions of Venmo transactions scraped in warning over privacy settings

A computer science student has scraped seven million Venmo transactions to prove that users’ public activity can still be easily obtained, a year after a privacy researcher downloaded hundreds of millions of Venmo transactions in a similar feat.

Dan Salmon said he scraped the transactions during a cumulative six months to raise awareness and warn users to set their Venmo payments to private.

The peer-to-peer mobile payments service faced criticism last year after Hang Do Thi Duc, a former Mozilla fellow, downloaded 207 million transactions. The scraping effort was possible because Venmo payments between users are public by default. The scrapable data inspired several new projects — including a bot that tweeted out every time someone bought drugs.

A year on, Salmon showed little has changed and that it’s still easy to download millions of transactions through the company’s developer API without obtaining user permission or needing the app.

Using that data, anyone can look at an entire user’s public transaction history, who they shared money with, when, and in some cases for what reason — including illicit goods and substances.

“There’s truly no reason to have this API open to unauthenticated requests,” he told TechCrunch. “The API only exists to provide like a scrolling feed of public transactions for the home page of the app, but if that’s your goal then you should require a token with each request to verify that the user is logged in.”

He published the scraped data on his GitHub page.

Venmo has done little to curb the privacy issue for its 40 million users since the scraping effort blew up a year ago. Venmo reacted by changing its privacy guide and, and later updated its app to remove a warning when users went to change their default privacy settings from public to private.

How to change your Venmo privacy settings.

Instead, Venmo has focused its effort on making the data more difficult to scrape rather than focusing on the underlying privacy issues.

When Dan Gorelick first sounded the alarm on Venmo’s public data in 2016, few limits on the API meant anyone could scrape data in bulk and at speed. Other researchers like Johnny Xmas have since said that Venmo restricted its API to limit what historical data can be collected. But Venmo’s most recent limits still allowed Salmon to spit out 40 transactions per minute. That amounts to about 57,600 scraped transactions each day, he said.

Last year, PayPal — which owns Venmo — settled with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy and security violations. The company was criticized for misleading users over its privacy settings. The FTC said users weren’t properly informed that some transactions would be shared publicly, and that Venmo misrepresented the app’s security by saying it was “bank-grade,” which the FTC disputed.

Juliet Niczewicz, a spokesperson for PayPal, did not return a request for comment.

The FTC settles with Venmo over a series of privacy and security violations