Payments Giants Sink CE 100 Index Despite Big Bets Abroad

The CE 100 Index lost 1.5%, as broad-based losses were a hallmark of trading throughout the week and into the end of the third quarter. Only one of the 11 pillars tracked by PYMNTS, the Be Well segment, gained ground, up 1.7%, where McKesson shares surged 9%.

McKesson said this past week that it was reorganizing its reporting segments and also boosted its guidance for long-term revenue growth.   

But the Pay and be Paid sector led to the downside, as the group sank 4.4%.

Affirm slid 17.6%. Visa shares lost 1.2%. Visa said this week that the payments network and intella, a builder of Arabic-first artificial intelligence (AI) models for enterprise contact centers, partnered to co-develop conversational AI models for financial institutions across the Middle East and North Africa. These solutions will support more than 25 distinct Arabic dialects, the companies said.  The collaboration will provide Visa’s network with access to intellaCX, which enables unstructured call data to be used for compliance, agent performance and product development, and Ziila, which is intella’s AI agent.

Mastercard and Alipay+ have teamed to promote contactless payments in South Korea. This partnership will see the two companies provide support for mobile wallet Kakao Pay in launching near-field communication (NFC) payment for overseas transactions, the companies indicated. Mastercard shares gave up 3.2%.

PYMNTS reported this week that PayPal is investing $100 million to support digital commerce in the Middle East and Africa.

The investment is to be deployed via minority investments, acquisitions, PayPal Ventures funding and people/technology deployments. The announcement follows the introduction of PayPal’s first regional hub in Dubai, designed to help businesses via improved payments and security as well as wider access to international markets. PayPal shares dipped 1.4%.

Within the Banking group, which lost 2.3%, JPMorgan Chase now offers its J.P. Morgan Private Client experience in 53 Chase branches in Connecticut, New York, Florida and Texas. The J.P. Morgan Private Client experience offers banking and wealth management services delivered by a dedicated banker at no fee to clients with qualifying balances of at least $750,000, according to its webpage. The banking giant was up 0.9%.

And within the Enablers segment, which lost ground slightly, off 0.4%, Oracle shares lost more than 8% in the wake of the news that President Donald Trump has signed the deal that moves control of TikTok’s American operations into U.S. hands through an investment group led by Oracle. Under the terms, U.S. investors will acquire the bulk of TikTok’s operations along with rights to a licensed version of its recommendation algorithm. The investor group will manage TikTok’s U.S. operations and provide cloud storage for American user data.

As reported this week, Oracle is being tapped to re-create and secure the United States version of TikTok’s algorithm. The arrangement would ensure the new buyers control TikTok’s recommendation software after its parent company, ByteDance, divests itself.

In Apple-related news, Apple is asking Europe’s antitrust regulator to do away with its digital protection rule. The company has asked European Commission to rethink its Digital Markets Act (DMA) a little more than a year after it was enacted. “Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU,” Apple wrote.

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