According to Mastercard’s SpendingPulse report, online retail grew 18.8% over last year’s holiday season. That’s enough to make online sales a record 14.6% of holiday shoppers total spend, the report says.
The strong numbers came in spite of 2019’s unusually short holiday season, commonly defined as the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Shoppers had six days fewer than they had in 2018.
E-commerce sales hit record highs this year as Americans continue to move their holiday shopping online. Online consumers this year spent 17% more on apparel, 8.8% more on jewelry, 10.7% more on electronics, and 6.9% more at department stores.
Overall, holiday spending jumped 3.4% compared to 2018. Steve Sadove, an advisor for MasterCard, said in a press release that retailers adapted to the shortened season.
“Due to a later than usual Thanksgiving holiday, we saw retailers offering omnichannel sales earlier in the season, meeting consumers’ demand for the best deals across all channels and devices.”
Interestingly – or ominously – retailers who accepted crypto or managed crypto payments were slow to respond when we asked them how their holiday shopping season went. eGifter, a gift card trading service, noted that it had not yet «crunched the numbers» on holiday sales but that «We saw growth in overall crypto sales,» said Bill Egan, the site’s VP of Marketing.
«We saw more gifting with crypto in 2019, compared to buy-for-self use cases in prior years,» he said.
Payment processor BitPay found the holidays quite inspiring as well.
«We saw twice our daily averages of processed volume leading up to the holiday,» said BitPay’s CMO, Bill Zielke.
It will be interesting to see what kind of statistics surface over the next few seasons as e-commerce becomes king and crypto payments come to the fore.
Hong Kong Securities Watchdog Issues Rules on Funds Investing in Crypto
Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) has issued regulations for fund managers investing in “virtual assets.”
In an Oct. 4 announcement, the financial market watchdog formalized a framework put out in November last year that was aimed to regulate funds that allocate more than 10 percent of their portfolio in virtual assets.
The 37-page regulation, which is effective immediately, defines virtual assets as “digital representations of value which may be in the form of digital tokens”, such as digital currencies, utility tokens or security or asset-backed tokens.
It also includes any other virtual commodities, crypto assets or other assets of essentially the same nature, regardless of whether they fall under the definition of “securities” or “futures contracts” under the agency’s existing ordinance.
Other than that, the document is fairly broad, as much of it follows existing regulations on fund-managers licensed by the SFC in general.
For instance, fund managers investing in crypto assets must have at least 3 million Hong Kong dollars ($382,000) of capital, similar to the minimal requirement for the SFC’s type 9 (asset management) licensees. An independent compliance officer needs to be appointed, and detailed compliance procedures must be drafted.
Crypto fund managers must appoint a third-party custodian and the assets of the fund and the fund manager must be kept separate. Fiat currency must also be kept separate at a licensed Hong Kong financial institution or in a jurisdiction approved by the SFC.
When choosing a custodian, the fund manager must establish that the institution is capable of dealing with virtual assets and that it understands relevant concepts, such as wallets. The SFC does allow for self-custody if certain requirements are met.
In terms of trading, the SFC requires fund managers to conduct extensive due diligence on crypto exchanges before using any virtual asset trading platform.
