China

India banned another 43 Chinese apps including some of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s key shopping services, expanding its mobile blacklist to more than 200 applications.

Alipay’s assembling a portfolio to stitch together a multinational financial services ecosystem. The mobile payments titan’s IPO will provide an enormous war chest to develop new services, turbocharge international expansion, and fund acquisitions, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

The months-long saga of Bytedance’s forced sale of TikTok in the U.S. is finally close to the finish line, and Walmart stands to gain new social tools and youthful consumers in its battle with Amazon and other brick and mortar chains.

The pandemic and subsequent economic crisis have raised the stakes, since the government’s role in recovery and how stimulus is delivered — and policies impacting the goals of card and technology companies — will be largely determined by the philosophy of leadership.

The Trump administration has barred the use of TikTok and WeChat inside the U.S., including a direct ban on WeChat Pay, setting up potential retaliation against U.S. companies that could interrupt international payment flows.

The controversial TikTok U.S. divestiture is inching toward a conclusion, but the battle over how and where data is collected has become a geopolitical barrier to international e-commerce growth that goes far beyond the Chinese video-sharing app.

An acquisition of the social app would bring with it users and data that can fuel Walmart, Microsoft or Oracle’s e-commerce and marketing battles against top competitors.

The global digital currency race has heightened the threat to traditional monetary policy and the dollar’s dominance, enough for the Federal Reserve of Boston to make a concerted effort to keep pace.

A CBDC has the potential to be a real game changer for the payment industry if one condition is met: central bank digital currency has to be built as an open and shared infrastructure for the private sector to easily build on top of it, says ConsenSys' Matthieu Saint Olive.

Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group generated about 9.2 billion yuan ($1.3 billion) of profit in the March quarter, offering investors a glimpse of its earnings power in the run up to its mega initial public offering.