mThink

Press Release MINNEAPOLIS – Dec. 10, 2012 – Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), the revenue growth experts in global cloud commerce, announced that it signed a global payments agreement with Skullcandy, Inc. (NASDAQ: SKUL), a high-growth performance lifestyle audio brand. Skullcandy is using the Digital River World Payments solution to build a localized European e- [...]

MasterCard Worldwide is a driving force at the heart of commerce, enabling global transactions and bringing insight into the payments process to make commerce faster, more secure and more valuable to everyone involved. As a critical link among financial institutions and millions of businesses, cardholders and merchants worldwide, MasterCard provides services in more than 210 [...]

CFO: What are some of the trends you’re following at MasterCard? Steve L. Abrams: The most significant trend involves global integration of card data into a corporation’s expense or enterprise system. For example, travel and entertainment cards and purchasing card programs have evolved from being vehicles that assist organizations in streamlining the expense payment process [...]

One of the hidden expenses of conducting international business is the value-added tax, or VAT. In many countries a value-added tax is levied on each business in the supply chain, calculated as a percentage of the sales price at each stage of production. Sellers are required to calculate the tax owed on each sale and [...]

Retail, commercial and capital markets’ banking organizations face tremendous pressure to scale their operations and do more with less. Major banks that achieve scale can gain significant competitive advantage over those that operate business units as separate entities with separate infrastructures and cost structures.

The need for scale, coupled with increasing cross-border operations and greater demand to support product innovation, is compelling large-scale banks to assess their overall operational and cost management strategies.

Decades ago, credit card networks transformed B-to-C commerce through electronic settlement of transactions. Today consumers and the companies they buy from would have a difficult time imagining life without “plastic.” Another dramatic change is occurring currently with the emergence of business settlement networks. A business settlement network dramatically lowers the costs of processing and paying [...]

JPMorgan Xign was formed by the recent acquisition of Xign Corporation by JPMorgan Chase. JPMorgan Xign’s on-demand service, the JPMorgan Business Settlement Network, transforms financial settlement operations through a highly efficient, electronic settlement network that connects buyers with their suppliers. With JPMorgan Xign, global organizations dramatically lower payables processing costs and unlock working capital through [...]

Can a company be innovative even though it has been offering basically the same product for more than 100 years? Of course it can, and Euler Hermes ACI proves it. Euler Hermes ACI – which began as American Credit Indemnity (ACI) – has insured and managed trade receivables in the United States since 1893, which [...]

Summary Within a few years, the ongoing consolidation of the enterprise software business will force companies to make major changes to this part of their IT infrastructure. Faced with increasing obsolescence of installed software produced by vendors that are no longer in business, companies will have to migrate. How they manage this process will affect [...]