Amazon has termed the claims made by consulting firm ShipMatrix “inaccurate.” ShipMatrix claims that Amazon’s on-time delivery rates had fallen to 93.7% in the week ending December 7 compared to 98.2% during the previous week, which also included Thanksgiving.

Amazon spokeswoman Rena Lunak admitted that some deliveries were delayed due to bad weather but asserted that the company had regained control of the situation.

The on-time delivery rate for Amazon van drivers is important because they account for the major chunk of deliveries of Amazon products.

Amazon charges its Prime users $119 per year with free delivery within 1 or 2 days. It said in April that it would spend $800M to cut delivery times from 2 days to 1 for them. Its network of van drivers is expected to deliver 275M packages this year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which is double that in 2018. Analysts have warned that Amazon’s delivery times leave very little room for error and failure to meet the deadlines.

ShipMatrix President Satish Jindel has pointed out that other carriers like UPS, FedEx transfer Amazon products by air over long distances, but still, their on-time delivery rates are similar to that of Amazon van drivers. Thus, just bad weather cannot be alone held responsible for the drop in on-time delivery rates. Satish said that as Amazon is a retailer, supplier and delivery firm the company might be facing problems in fulfilling the rush of orders in the festive season. In other words, it may be blaming the weather for covering up its failures in fulfilling orders on time.

Amazon began its involvement in the delivery of goods after a massive upswing in orders in 2013 which had caused a breakdown in its supply chain. This resulted in delayed delivery of products and upset the customers. Amazon’s logistics unit has many warehouses, almost 50 planes on lease and 30,000 delivery vans.

The world’s leading open-source blockchain satellite network, SpaceChain, has released its third cryptocurrency wallet node into space. SpaceChain aims to build a blockchain-based network in space. It is a significant and ambitious project compared to other projects.

SpaceChain wants to develop a cryptocurrency wallet in space with the aim of no physical attack or control over it. It is the safest digital currency wallet in existence. The company has already launched its two rockets in China, which has holding parts of the wallet and network. Now, it is launching the third one from outside of the United States in Florida.

During the rocket launch, the CEO of SpaceChain, Zee Zheng, said that the company had put all its resources into this project. He declared that there is a much difference between the third one and the other two rockets that they have already launched. He forced his team to build a unique design to fulfill their needs and requirements.

NASA will get involved in this project after some time. The space program asked SpaceChain to ensure that their hardware must be fit and attached to the International Space Station (ISS). It will take a long time to release the idea of SpaceChain for use.

Recently, the Accounts Receivable Automation platform, Invoiced, declared its partnership with Chase’s WePay to provide invoiced payments. The Invoiced customers can use this integrated payment processing solution for easy and secure setup payment processing services.

Invoiced is connected with the integrated payments business of JPMorgan Chase and Co. to offer payment processing solutions to more than 23,000 businesses. They trust the Invoiced company for all their accounts receivable operations. The Accounts Receivable Automation platform is suitable for handling invoiced payments seamlessly.

Invoiced is a well-known platform with more than 20,000 customers in 92 countries, and approximately $50 billion of receivables are processed. On the other hand, WePay is an integrated payment processing provider and helps small businesses by providing software and applications like BigCommerce, Zoho, GoFundMe, etc.

There is a frictionless customer payment portal on the Invoiced platform that helps customers in online payments through debit cards, credit cards, ACH, etc. Clients do not need to research, set up, and combine gateway or payment processor.

There are many features as well as benefits of Invoiced payments:

1. Quick Onboarding: One can start without any form or account sign-up. It takes a couple of minutes to accept online payments for businesses.
2. Reasonable Pricing: Invoiced Payments provides affordable, competitive, and transparent rates to many businesses.
3. Smooth Integration: The payment entry, as well as transactions, appears in a single payment portal of the client.
4. Security: Invoiced Payments is PCI-compliant, and the integration with Invoiced will minimize the overall PCI-compliance overhead.

Co-founder and CEO of Invoiced, Jared King, said that their main aim of the company is to make the process of billing and collections easy, efficient, and useful. Chase provides Invoiced Payments to the businesses to offer comprehensive, integrated A/R and payment solutions.

Marketing VP of WePay, Jennifer Lewis, said that small businesses focus on developing their companies. But sometimes, they got bogged down due to some backend operations, which take a lot of time to solve. But, their collaboration with Invoiced provides Invoiced Payments that can solve some of their issues. Currently, Invoiced Payments are available for users in the US and Canada with paid accounts.

The market of green investments has emerged as a bright area for money managers and banks over the past few years in the times of slow-moving growth. A treasure trove of 30 trillion dollars has managed to remain unregulated so far, but things are soon going to change with recent developments.

Green investments, considered one rapidly growing financial area, may come under regulation as Brussels officials are contemplating the idea. Interestingly, the United States’ federal watchdogs are mostly out of this debate. Hence, the efforts of the European Union could turn out to be the benchmark for green finance across the world.

As Ilan Jacobs, Citigroup Inc’s co-head of European Government Affairs, puts it; the EU here believes it’s a global leader and will help establish a standard.

It has to be noted that though Europe has taken some regulatory missteps, it has also been a front runner on problems on which a hands-off approach was taken by the US.

At the same time, any regulations made and agreed on green finance in Brussels will apply only in Europe. However, they could end up being adopted globally – a thing which has happened in the past, too. For instance, in 2018, Microsoft and Facebook stated they would largely apply the new rules for data protection of Europe even outside the continent.

Forming a “green investment” definition

One of the prime aims is also to commonly define green investments and curb all the malpractices that go on in the form of green investments. The market often experiences greenwashing wherein, the products are called sustainable even when they’ve zero elements for fighting climate change. That hampers market development significantly.

As a result, establishing a catalog, termed as taxonomy, is at the core of the plan. It would outline what makes up sustainable practices that can be eligible for green funds, bonds, and other product offerings.

A group of experts is scrutinizing what would be a consistent level of energy emission and consumption with the Paris Climate Agreement. So far, criteria for nearly 70 economic affairs have been developed, right from manufacturing and agriculture to electricity and transport.

According to the reports, the taxonomy of the group could lay the foundation for the new directives by 2022 end. However, some of the investors are utilizing the draft criteria already to check whether their holdings can be construed as green, as per Nathan Fabian, tech expert group’s member.

Once in place officially, the investment funds wanting to claim their contribution to environmental objectives will have to reveal their extent of compliance with the European standards.

Fabian also said that this disclosure would apply to all the investment fund products that are issued in Europe. That includes investment product offerings from companies based outside the continent.

Thus, such development will have a huge effect on the entire green investment arena, worth about 30+ trillion dollars.

In addition to that, the taxonomy will also act as the basis for the standard of EU green bonds as well as possibly other products. For those who came in late, green bonds are the most established and simplest sustainable finance form. These bonds are specifically issued for funding environment-friendly projects.

Europe’s aim behind green finance regulation is to direct additional private funds in such products.

As far as money managers are concerned, they’re not opposing the common green finance standards. They just don’t want to be forced to report their green metric immediately for their holdings or told how they could run their funds, shared Steffen Hoerter, ESG head at Allianz Global Investors.

Recently, PayPal has invested $6 billion and purchased Honey, an e-commerce browser plugin from Honey Science Corporation.

Honey is an excellent extension to the browsers that notify all the deals to the shoppers, such as coupon codes on various products in different e-commerce websites like Amazon. The plugin helps in tracking the prices of the products, and after comparing it, a shopper gets sales alerts and price history charts. Honey Gold is a rewards program in this plugin.

According to the reports, there are 17 monthly active users of Honey extension and now, PayPal and 300 million users of its subsidiary Venmo have connected with it by investing a large amount of $6 billion. Honey is used as a plugin on 30,000 e-commerce sites by 17 million shoppers.

PayPal is aiming to use the data of Honey on the shoppers to crack the deal and compete with other payment providers like ApplePay, etc. With the integration of Honey, it will help PayPal and its network of 24 million users.

The CEO of PayPal, Dan Schulman, said that in the entire history of PayPal, it is the most significant decision to acquire Honey. There are many services provided by Honey to make the consumer shopping experience easy in an affordable and rewarding way. The integration of the extension will add more value to their platform.

It is profitable to have Honey as it had revenue of $147 million in 2018, with $47 million of funding. It is one of the leading tech acquisitions of 2019 in the market as it is providing high value to other businesses as well.

PayPal is growing rapidly that the CEO, Schulman, pointed towards the better-than-expected Q3 2019 numbers and spend a lot of amounts to weaken the recession thing by its customers.

After considering the problems like Brexit, impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, and the trade war between the US and China, Schulman said that there are many ways to break them. He continued that they are looking for strong secular growth as per their perspective. According to the people, they have been expecting a recession for some time, but they are predicting such things. According to the journal, 64% of economists polled for the Economic Forecasting Survey that is expecting a recession by 2021.

Recently, PayPal also bailed Libra digital currency by Facebook and made a statement that if finance regulators and legislators across the world allow a consortium of Facebook to create a planet-spanning payment network, then it will destabilize the financial system of the world.