Cross border payments

It was the second consecutive year remittances to emerging nations fell, while remittances to certain regions—including Latin America and the Caribbean—rose.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA, Spain’s No. 2 lender, has executed its first cross-border payments through a system based on the software that supports bitcoin.

Issuers and other organizations accept a nominal level of money laundering. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can improve that.

Payments volume and cross-border business helped drive the strong performance.

Bottomline Technologies, which specializes in business payments, is the latest to introduce a fraud-fighting solution for members of the Swift payment network.

Jack Ma’s Ant Financial Services Group has deep enough pockets to win the bidding war against Euronet Worldwide for MoneyGram, but money may not be the deciding factor in this deal.

Leaked documents appear to show NSA analysts were able to hack into Middle Eastern banks’ servers through the Swift service bureau EastNets. The same tools could conceivably be used by cybercriminals and nation-states with more sinister motives.

Ant Financial raised its agreed offer for MoneyGram International Inc. by 36 percent as the financial-services company controlled by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma tries to top a competing offer and overcome security concerns.

The service will start with transfers to India and the Phillipines, though Remitly plans to add more recipient countries in the near future.

Despite some mixed signals, the Chinese government has shown a willingness to loosen restrictions on imports. That would be good news for international payments players.