Japan

PayPay, a mobile payments company backed by SoftBank Group Corp., Yahoo Japan Corp. and India’s largest digital-payments company Paytm, said it’s updating its app to strengthen security after multiple complaints from users of wrongful charges.

Chinese payment companies have successfully lured merchants outside of China by enabling payments for Chinese tourists, a use case Tencent hopes will work in Japan, where rival Alipay lurks.

Payments technology and fleet card provider WEX has partnered with Japanese-based international card network, JCB, as expands its virtual cards into Japan.

Indian wallet provider Paytm has entered the Japanese market in a joint venture with SoftBank Group and Yahoo Japan.

Companies have tried for years to build a market for interactive cards, with little success. Dynamics is taking a different tack by approaching banks to issue the cards, rather than selling directly to consumers.

Bank of Hawaii will serve Japanese citizens looking to conduct business in the United States.

Kraken, one of the world’s longest-operating cryptocurrency exchanges, will end its trading services for Japanese residents.

Global policymakers are all over the map when it comes to regulating cryptocurrencies. But industry participants are eager to have some direction — and soon.

Coincheck Inc., the cryptocurrency exchange that lost about $500 million of customer deposits to hackers in January, was acquired by Monex Group Inc. in a deal that sent shares of the Japanese retail brokerage soaring to a five-year high.

Last month, banks submitted draft policies on the so-called application programming interfaces, or APIs, that will open up their systems to fintech firms seeking to do everything from payments and remittances to budget planning