Samsung has teamed up with financial services comparison site Finder to add a credit card shopping feature to Samsung Pay, “enabling everyday Australians to discover compelling credit card offers from participating financial institutions” from within its mobile wallet... More
A group of 20 European banks are working together on “setting up a pan-European payment system to challenge the dominance of Visa, Mastercard and technology companies such as Google and PayPal,” French news agency AFP reports... More
“UPI has had the fastest acceptance rate not just among payment platforms but digital platforms of any kind,” Dilip Asbe, chief executive officer of the National Payments Corporation of India, has told Bloomberg... More
Mastercard has signed up four WHSmith retail brands for Pay by Bank (PbBa), a strong customer authentication-compliant payments service that uses customers’ mobile banking apps and the UK’s faster payments system to let online retailers accept payments direct from shoppers’ bank accounts... More
Visa, Mastercard, eBay, Stripe and Mercado Pago have followed PayPal in pulling out of Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency project. The moves mean that PayU is now the only payments company to still be listed as a founding member of the Libra Association. More
PARTNER NEWS: Raiffeisen Bank has launched an Android NFC mobile payments service in Romania and the Czech Republic that uses Antelop Solutions’ digital payments and tokenization platform... More
“In the last 12 months alone, we’ve grown more than three times to 67 million monthly active users, driving transactions worth over US$110bn on an annualised basis, with hundreds of thousands of offline and online merchants,” Caesar Sengupta, vice president of Google’s next billion users initiative, has revealed... More
Banks are at risk of losing up to 15% of global payments revenue, valued at US$280bn, due to “the growth of digital payments and competition from non-banks”, Accenture predicts — but they also have the opportunity to capture US$500bn in new payments-related revenues “if they adopt innovative business models”... More
Merchants in Poland are to be the first to pilot a new service that enables them to accept contactless payments of any amount “via a smartphone or tablet, in the same way a traditional payment terminal functions but with no additional equipment”... More
Co-working space provider All Work & Social has signed up as the launch partner for a biometric payments system that uses the pattern of veins in a customer’s fingertip to replace the need to carry a card, phone or cash... More
Saudi Payments, Saudi Arabia’s national payments infrastructure operator, is to use a combination of NFC and contactless payments, a new faster payments system and the introduction of a common QR code platform to reduce the use of cash and speed up its move towards a cashless society, managing director Ziad Al Yousef has told NFCW... More
NSW looks to facial recognition as Opal card alternative — iTnews — “In the transport space we’ll use facial recognition technology to scan customers who’ve ‘opted in’ and linked their Opal account… No more gate barriers – just a smooth journey.”
Central bank unveils plan on digital currency — China Daily — “The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, is organising market-oriented institutions to jointly research and develop a central bank digital currency and the programme has been approved by the State Council, the country’s Cabinet, Wang Xin, director of the PBOC Research Bureau, said at a seminar at Peking University.”
Coming in 2020: Calibra — Facebook — “Today we’re sharing plans for Calibra, a newly formed Facebook subsidiary whose goal is to provide financial services that will let people access and participate in the Libra network. The first product Calibra will introduce is a digital wallet for Libra, a new global currency powered by blockchain technology. The wallet will be available in Messenger, WhatsApp and as a standalone app — and we expect to launch in 2020.”
National Payments Corporation of India mulls using blockchain to boost digital transactions — Business Today — “The NPCI has floated an Expression of Interest (EOI) in order to enable bidders to propose their capability for developing distributed ledger technology/blockchain in the payment domain.”
Deutsche Kreditbank (DKB) is enabling cardholders to use biometrics and their banking app to verify their identity in real time when making online purchases with their credit card... More
PayPal CEO predicts digital payments industry will mature into a $100 trillion market — CNBC — “PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told CNBC that the digital payments industry may become a US$100tn market as the financial technology sector continues to grow rapidly… ‘We live in the space of digital commerce and digital commerce is exploding still around the world,’ he said. ‘There’s an explosion in digital commerce and we’re riding that wave.'”
Softbank plots digital payments raid with plans for Paypal rival — City AM — “Japanese technology giant Softbank is planning to create a global digital payments system that could rival giants such as PayPal, according to reports. The tech firm will lead a consortium backed by some of the world’s biggest banks… Under the plan, Softbank could acquire a large financial software business as a springboard to rolling out the new system.”
We have set up Paytm Money to focus on investment and wealth management — Paytm — “We are fast evolving from being a pioneer in digital payments to becoming a full-stack financial services company, which offers banking, lending, insurance, and payments. With Paytm Money, we will cover the entire spectrum of wealth management and plan to add more investment offerings going forward.”
Govt to incentivise online payments to push digital transactions — Hindustan Times — “The incentives could include cashbacks and reward points for BHIM users… The note presented last week by the ministry of electronics and information technology to Parliament’s standing committee on finance detailed a five-step road map to push e-transactions. ‘Digital payments to be made visibly cheaper than cash,’ the note said.
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