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Saudi Arabia-based fintech infrastructure platform Lean Technologies has raised USD 67.5 million in a Series B funding round to scale its Pay-by-Bank and Open Banking offerings.

Mastercard has entered into a partnership with Tap Payments to launch a Click to Pay with Payment Passkey service for optimised ecommerce transactions. 

Mollie, a financial service provider in Europe, has introduced Tap to Pay on iPhone, enabling businesses to accept contactless payments via the Mollie app.

Mbank has partnered with Al Etihad Payments Company (AEP), a Central Bank of the UAE (CBUAE) subsidiary, to introduce the Aani Instant Payment Platform on its mobile application.

A partnership of all fourteen fire departments and all five rescue squads in the county with Catawba County Emergency Services has resulted in a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that will fund a large amount of the costs to purchase new radios to significantly improve communications by and between the fire and rescue agencies and the County�s 911 Communications Center.

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New rules kick in today that will help aspiring teachers pay for college and complete a years-long overhaul of the federal TEACH Grant program — from a bureaucratic bear trap that hobbled thousands of teachers with unfair student loan debts to a program that may actually make good on its foundational promise: to help K-12 educators pay for their own education in exchange for teaching a high-need subject, like math, for four years in a low-income community.

"The changes announced today deliver much-needed improvements to the TEACH Grant," said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. "Respecting and honoring teachers who serve students with the greatest needs also requires that we ensure these educators receive the support to which they are entitled from this important federal program without having to jump through unnecessary hoops."

In Dec. 2018, the Department of Education under Secretary Betsy DeVos committed to overhauling the program and, last summer, posted its more flexible revisions. Among those changes that go into effect today, teachers will no longer have their grants automatically converted to loans if they fail to submit annual certification paperwork. Instead, with eight years to make good on a four-year teaching requirement, teachers won't have their grants converted to loans until completion of the required service is no longer feasible.

The rule changes to the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program were outlined by the U.S. Department of Education nearly a year ago but only go into effect today. And they are the culmination of a story that began several years ago, when the Government Accountability Office, followed by an NPR investigation, revealed that the program's strict paperwork requirements — what Cardona calls "unnecessary hoops" — were tripping up teachers who were keeping their end of the deal.

In accordance with the program's old rules, if a teacher did not submit annual paperwork on time documenting their teaching service in a qualified school, their TEACH Grants were automatically converted into loans that must be paid back with interest. Teachers who tried to appeal this conversion were given little recourse and told the process was not reversible.

Kaitlyn McCollum was teaching high school in Tennessee when her federal TEACH Grants were turned into more than $20,000 in loans simply because she had narrowly missed a paperwork deadline. In the spring of 2019, her debts were erased as part of the department's overhaul.

"We won," she told NPR. "We raised our voices and they finally heard us. Disbelief followed by a relief like I have not felt before."

While the program's flaws date back to its beginning, in 2008, it was the Trump administration that agreed to a remedy and apologized to teachers.

"We've put teachers who didn't deserve this stress, this pressure, this financial burden in a position that is frightening and confusing," the Education Department's then-acting undersecretary and acting assistant secretary, Diane Auer Jones, told NPR in 2019. "It seems like a small thing to do to say, 'I'm sorry,' but I'm very sorry. And we want to work to fix it and correct it."

In Aug. 2020, NPR reported that, since the program's overhaul began, more than 6,500 educators had successfully petitioned to have nearly $44 million in loans turned back into TEACH Grants. For teachers who could prove they had already completed their required service, their debts were simply discharged. For teachers still serving, the conversion meant they could resume the deal they made with the department and work to keep their grant money.

The new regulations also give teachers more options for pausing their service obligation, create a formal reconsideration process for any teacher who believes they've had their grants converted unfairly, and expand the scope of the program to include not only low-income communities but also high-need, rural areas where recruiting and retaining teachers can be difficult.

The Biden Administration says it wants to expand the TEACH Grant, making it more generous. If passed by Congress, the American Families Plan would increase the grant for college juniors, seniors and graduate students from $4,000 a year to $8,000 and would also make it available to many early childhood educators. In a release, the Education Department said it expects these changes would increase the number of TEACH recipients by more than 50 percent, to nearly 40,000 in 2022 — welcome news to school leaders in remote and high-need communities that sometimes struggle to entice new talent to the classroom.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Although most people who receive and manage Social Security benefits on behalf of other individuals perform their duties well.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine says that Medicare’s value-based payment programs could take into account social risk factors – such as low socio-economic position, residence in disadvantaged neighborhoods, or race and ethnicity – but any proposal to do so will entail both advantages and disadvantages that need to be carefully considered.

Consumer access to effective and affordable medicines is an imperative for public health, social equity, and economic development, but this need is not being served adequately by the biopharmaceutical sector, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provides a blueprint and eight overarching strategies for improving health care for the approximately 100,000 people in the United States living with sickle cell disease (SCD).

Every year, significant amounts of drugs left over and unused from single-dose vials are discarded, but because of the way drugs are priced and paid for in the United States, the cost of the discarded amount cannot be recouped, says a new congressionally mandated report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Ensuring access to high-quality primary care for all people in the United States will require reforming payment models, expanding telehealth services, and supporting integrated, team-based care, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Blanket bans on ransomware payments are a much-debated topic in cybersecurity and policy circles. What are the implications of outlawing the payments, and would the ban be effective?

At its fiscal fourth quarter earnings call Thursday, Indus' top management said that while Vi has started clearing 90-100% of current dues, the tower company is closely monitoring the telco's payment patterns and its funding situation to recover its accumulated past dues as per the agreed schedule.

Employees want workplace flexibility, a greater emphasis on diversity, and impartial hiring processes, while companies are eager to provide fair, engaging and streamlined candidate experiences to attract and retain top talent, according to experts.

The 52-year-old Tesla founder has previously said that his rocky takeover of Twitter last year was "an accelerant to creating X, the everything app," a reference to the X.com company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become PayPal, a payments giant.

X announced in July that TweetDeck, a popular program that allows users to monitor multiple accounts and lists of users at once, would be available only to "verified" account holders from August.

European telecoms firms, including Orange and Vodafone, are calling on the EU to make tech and streaming giants pay for the large amounts of bandwidth they consume. Telecoms companies argue that they need more money to maintain and update infrastructure to meet Europe's data needs, and believe it would be fairer for companies like Netflix to contribute.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's proposal would subject companies like Alphabet, Apple, PayPal and Block's CashApp to bank-like supervision, with CFPB examiners inspecting their privacy protections, executives' conduct and compliance with laws barring unfair and deceptive practices.

HDFC bank, ICICI Bank and others are deploying their own QR code stickers at merchant outlets, competing with the likes of Paytm and others.

According to RBI’s Bulletin for June, UPI transactions in May reached a record Rs 14.3 trillion in terms of value and 9.41 billion in volume. Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is expected to account for 90% of retail digital transactions volume in the next five years.

During this year’s festive season sales, credit cards and credit-based payment instruments like pay-later products saw a significant increase, according to industry reports. Transactions rose by 35-50% compared to last year, with a large share being made through credit cards, EMIs, and pay-later options. Unified Payments Interface (UPI) remained the dominant payment method, with a 34% rise in transactions and over 500 million daily payments recorded.

BuyFin Payment Processing, which is offered in conjunction with third-party partners, helps business owners get paid faster from customers with competitive processing rates and a best-in-class technology platform, the company states.

“Hire willing people and provide them the skills — as opposed to hiring spoiled, experienced people with skills and behavior problems.” 

Ganesh Betageri, MBA, serves as the head of engineering at Breach Insurance

Esteemed educator, author, and podcaster, Barbara Taber, EdD, has delivered the highly anticipated season finale of Take It Or Leave It, against impossibly high expectations, following the landmark achievement of her previous three episodes.

The DragonFly Wallet is quickly becoming a top choice for ethical cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

The Sweet Spot, a beloved yoga and wellness studio known for its inclusivity and community spirit, is shaking things up with the launch of a unique "Pay What You Want" price model.

Bringing live broadcast spatial content production and co-presence to 360-surround livestream event experiences

The Complaint alleges that PayCor misclassified its implementation consultants as exempt and improperly denied them overtime pay when they worked overtime hours.

Fastmetrics, the Official Business Internet Service Provider of the San Jose Earthquakes and a leading B2B ISP, will be the presenting sponsor for their Major League Soccer match on Saturday, March 5 (2:30 p.m. PT).

Providing organizations with more payment processing options on the DoJiggy fundraising platform

In a world where access to space is getting more affordable, Rogue leads the way for cost-effective payload hosting

In a significant triumph, LetKnow Pay has been honored with the prestigious title of "Best Crypto Payment Gateway" at the UF Awards Global 2024 ceremony.

Tidy Task, a Denver-based cleaning company, ran a promotion last November for recurring customers that just paid off big for lucky customer that opted-in.

Papaya was established in 2013 by a group of key personnel who have been working in Korea's leading map service providers such as Naver, Kakao, and INAVI.

The cash-in payment network chooses iDenfy's AML services to ensure global compliance

The WJA Open is a golf tournament that directly supports students of the Washington Jesuit Academy (WJA), a private, all-boys, tuition-free Catholic school educating students from underserved neighborhoods in the metro D.C. region.

Boulder met 100% of the performance quality measures for their telehealth treatment of patients with Substance Use Disorder as outlined in the agreement with the managed Medicaid insurer.

It is now possible to make on-site payments using Naver Pay only with an Apple Watch without taking out a mobile phone. Naver Financial announced on the 7th that it has released

The Complaint alleges that Apple failed to include the value of vested restricted stock units (RSUs) when calculating hourly employees' overtime rates for overtime hours they worked.