5.23.18 Your morning briefing

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web:

Grab gets support for its e-wallet
Asian ride sharing app Grab has been outperforming rival Uber on a number of fronts in its home market and has found a bank partner for its mobile wallet in Malaysia.

ChannelNewsAsia reports Maybank will support the GrabPay wallet, and will launch a pilot in the next few weeks with Maybank merchants. Maybank customers can also pay with the bank's QRPay at GrabPay merchants.

Malaysians will be able to top up GrabPay through Maybank2U, its e-banking site.

Ore Huiying/Bloomberg

Bank warms to bitcoin
Banks have generally been more interested in the blockchain technology that supports bitcoin than in the virtual currency itself, though a bank in Argentina will allow bitcoins for cross-border payments.

Banco Masventas has partnered with the Latin American bitcoin exchange Bitex to use bitcoins to execute payments, reports Coindesk, adding the bank uses Bitex to execute the bitcoin payment. The actual transaction does not change for the consumer.

The Argentinian bank plans to use bitcoin for more transactions, the cryptocurrency news site reports.

Solar payments
Mastercard and Kenyan social energy M-KOPA are developing a "pay-as-you-go" pilot to provide solar equipment in Uganda for homes and businesses.

The partnership supports a deposit and a recurring payment agreement to forgo the expense of purchasing solar equipment.

The card network will facilitate the payments and provide an incremental payment API to connect structures to M-KOPA hardware that controls the solar panels and other equipment.

Slow open
The PSD2-driven data sharing between banks and fintechs is allegedly getting off to a sluggish start in the U.K., according to a fintech trade group that wants the authorities to lean on banks.

The Emerging Payments Association is calling on the Open Banking Implementation Entity—a group overseeing the introduction of open banking—to light a fire under a group of banks that the EPA contends have varying levels of enthusiasm.

The EPA wants OBIE to amend its framework, which likely means tighter regulations or monitoring, to ensure third parties can "realize the potential" of open banking.

From the Web

Cash is still king even as digital payments are set to rise, according to PayPal's CTO
CNBC | Tue May 22, 2018 - Cash still matters, and it won't go away anytime soon, according to the chief technology officer at PayPal. Many companies are trying to create a digital payments economy, but they face stiff competition from regular currencies, according to Sri Shivananda, senior vice president and chief technology officer at PayPal.

Starbucks’s mobile payment service is slightly outpacing Apple’s
TechCrunch | Tue May 22, 2018 - Starbucks, which has operated its own mobile payments service since 2011, is the market leader in terms of mobile payments users, beating out Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, according to a new reporter from eMarketer out this morning. However, Starbucks’ lead over Apple Pay is only a small one – in 2017, it had 20.7 million U.S. users compared with Apple Pay’s 19.7 million.

Meet the Goldman Sachs-Backed Fintech Startup Aiming to Take Over North America
Fortune | Tue May 22, 2018 - Consumers who have ever used an app to manage any aspect of their finances have most likely used Plaid—even if they didn’t know it. Fintech companies from robo-advisors to budget trackers to lenders all depend on the little-known startup.

More from PaymentsSource

Visa jumps into crowded Canadian B2C payments market
Visa Canada plans to offer real-time B2B and B2C disbursements via its Visa Direct card-to-card transfer service, competing head-on with Canada's Interac network and a product Mastercard launched in the country earlier this year.

Can APIs help a teen-targeted payment card succeed?
Success stories about teen-focused payment cards are relatively few, despite steady improvements in technology to give kids a measure of independence in their spending while parents hold the purse strings via shared apps.

How Adobe's Magento deal puts it at forefront of fintech
Adobe’s powers to drive digital customer experiences with cloud-based systems will reshape Magento's offerings and underscore how critical a robust payments stack has become to commercial infrastructure providers serving a global, omnichannel audience.

Circle targets cryptocurrency rookies with coin investing app
Circle Internet Financial Ltd., a mobile-payments and cryptocurrency-trading firm backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., is making a push to become the go-to destination for first-time Bitcoin buyers.