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Excellent judgement by the Tyro Board rejecting several deficient flawed offers by Westpac. The idea a 20-year established Acquirer with a top tier modern technology stack and substantial track record and revenue steams could be acquired for about US$600 million seems laughable. What were you thinking Westpac?

Kudos to the Collisin brothers for addressing this layoff ethically and honestly, and admitting an executive MC level error. FIS deservedly lost 1/3rd of its market cap today, stock down 29%, over CEO / MC and Board level fumbles. Fiserv has thrown out 100s of highly experienced people out all year long, no senior exec courage or integrity to come out with announcement or admit their own mistakes. If you hold all the authority at the top, you have all the responsibility. The Collisons get that, bravo.

Lost on all the pundits and wonks commenting on merchant data breaches is one of the main contributing exposures merchants have created: Using the public internet for both store communications and payment card tranbsaction processing, and lack of encryption of the messaging themsleves and asscoiated payment card account data elements.  Culpable in this process are the merchant banks who continue to encourage and promote use of the internet for card processing without providing suitable protective services as part of their core offerings. While this strategy of use of the internet has obvious cost and service advantages, it comes with alot of exposure.   An alternative would be for retailers to consider both encryption processes and/or implementation of private IP data networks for POS transaction processing.