PayPal beat earnings estimates, on the back of solid growth in overall transactions volume including traction in its app Venmo. The online payment processing company raked in adjusted earnings-per-share of 58 cents in Q3, higher than analysts’ estimates of 54 cents.Revenues surged +14% to $3.68 billion, compared to analysts’ average projection of $3.67 billion. PayPal’s Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman has emphasized on the recent success of its mobile payment app Venmo, which is popular among millenials.

Over the last eight months, American Express (NYSE: AXP) has been trending higher with a trend channel defining the peaks and valleys.That is a move of approximately 8% in just over a month. In addition to the technical picture, American Express has great fundamentals.

American Express Co. is increasing reward points for its premium credit card customers. AmEx Gold Card holders will now earn 4 points per dollar spent at U.S. restaurants and supermarkets, up from 2 points previously.Additionally, they get a yearly $120 credit by using their cards to make payments to the Cheesecake Factory, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, certain Shake Shack locations, GrubHub and Seamless.

Google might have struck a ‘secret’ deal with Mastercard to track consumers’ offline purchases. A Bloomberg report indicates that according to some people familiar with the matter, Google paid Mastercard millions of dollars in exchange for insights into whether the  online ads run by the search engine led to consumers buying things from physical stores for the past year.The data, if indeed accessed by Google, is likely to have helped the tech giant in its advertising business strategies as it got to know consumers’ purchase habits and history beyond online platforms. These reports could potentially raise concerns about how far consumer credit/debit card data is protected from third parties.

There was acquisition buzz over the weekend, with Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and Tencent involved in talks to buy an approximately 20% stake in the Chinese unit of WPP, the world's largest advertising group.This acquisition would value WPP at roughly $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, in Europe, French technology services company Atos has agreed to acquire Syntel in a $3.7 billion all-cash transaction.

Mastercard got a patent that will allow them to conduct blockchain payments on their credit cards.This would provide a major inconvenience to everyone. 

This decentralized, public transaction ledger has been embraced by financial institutions for its transparency, speed, and security (as well as its potential to cut costs), and creative uses are being regularly implemented in different sectors.Now, JPMorgan has announced potential plans to spin-off its blockchain network, Quorum, into an independent company. Quorum, which shares 95 percent of its software with cryptocurrency Ethereum’s blockchain, is an “enterprise-focused version of Ethereum…ideal for any application requiring high speed and high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants” aimed at addressing “specific challenges to blockchain technology adoption within the financial industry, and beyond.” The open-source project began in 2016, becoming part of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance (EEA) in February of 2017.