Cross border payments

Visa, along with Google Ventures, invested in an $80 million Series E fundraising round in cross-border B2B payments provider Currencycloud.

Alipay and WorldRemit will enable consumers to send remittances to the Alipay app to support broader use for payments and other financial services.

Square's merchants have shown early interest in cryptocurrency payments, and if merchants accept this new concept, it could exist along with other Square services to support numerous use cases, including broader financial services.

While the size of the global remittances market may ebb and flow with the global economy, one thing is clear – it’s massive, at over $700 billion in payments each year and growing.

Ebanx isn't new to the payments technology game in Latin America, having focused on cross-border e-commerce technology a few years ago to allow consumers in that region to make purchases from international merchants.

Fintech bank and payment services provider LHV is now providing real-time payments in the U.K. through the country's Faster Payments scheme, allowing it to handle U.K. currency in addition to euro payments in the Single Euro Payment Area through SEPA Instant.

Businesses have to ensure they're not losing money on the currency exchange, and volatility in the local market could upset their earnings or pricing structures in those areas, says Rapyd's Joel Yarbrough.

Stablecoins, with their instant settlement and high liquidity, averts the issues that have long plagued cross-border transactions

2019 kicked off with a series of large, multibillion-dollar acquisitions that promised to forever change the landscape of the payments industry. And while those big deals were clustered at the start of the year, many other pivotal deals took place over the course of the year.

When the European Union began developing the Single Euro Payments Area more than a decade ago, it didn't include a vision for real-time payments and the potential for a third European payments scheme.