Japan

Square Inc. has just scored its oldest customer ever — a 1,200-year-old Buddhist temple in central Japan.

Blockchain, the technology behind bitcoin, is increasingly seen as a way to cut costs for international payments.

Around the same time PayPal spun off from eBay Inc. to become its own company last year, it also took on the global money transfer provider Xoom. This acquisition may have been overshadowed by PayPal's bigger news, but it remains key to the company's post-eBay strategy.

PayPal's digital money transfer service Xoom will allow Japanese immigrants and others in the U.S. to send money for deposit into bank accounts in Japan.