YouTube Soothes, Dunkin’ Runs On Bitcoin, Aropostale Pulls Off A Miracle

It was a big week for payments and commerce last week. The rapid proliferation of headlines indicated that everyone came back from summer vacation tanned, rested and committed to finishing off 2016 with a sprint.
Some of the big news was expected – the iPhone launched to a collective yawn and probably decent sales in its first weekend. Nothing like having the competition’s phone blow up, literally, to drive sales of your own product.
Some of it was unexpected – like Wells Fargo’s nine-figure CFPB fine for a truly shocking collection of violations. While it’s not hard to foresee the CFPB fining a bank in any given week, the fact that one of the biggest banks in the country had employees creating scores of fake credit card and bank accounts was something that was hard for anyone to truly predict was in the offing.
Well, no one but maybe Amazon. The reasons why it said ‘goodbye and don’t let the door hit you on the way out’ to Wells seem to get clearer by the minute. Who needs that reputational drag.
And the hits, as they say, just kept on coming. YouTube tried to fend off a wave of internet discontent over its monetization policy – with mixed results. Mastercard got pulled into its latest round of interchange fee lawyers looking for a quick buck, and contributing to the miracles-are-real file, Aropostale managed to avoid liquidation and will live to sell another day.

This post was published at Pymnts on September 12, 2016.