Cross border payments

Italian payments provider Axepta-BNL Group is launching the WeChat Pay service to its clients, saying it is the first in the country to offer the popular Chinese mobile payment and social networking app.

Our annual Most Influential Women in Payments feature, now in its seventh year, highlights the women who are creating change and opportunities in the payments industry. For the first time, the editors of PaymentsSource have also recognized one woman for lifetime achievement.

Jenifer Swallow has been here before, feeling the excitement of being in in an industry that was about to change commerce forever.

The uncertainty of the modern political climate has created a number of business issues — and a few opportunities for the companies that can guide others through difficult times.

Mastercard has dropped out of a recent bidding war with Visa to acquire Earthport, announcing it will instead buy Transfast, a different cross-border payments firm.

The mobile revolution is turning Western Union into a very different company, one that must adjust to new ways to pay while pouring substantial resources into fending off the threat of e-commerce.

INTL FCStone's Global Payments Division's foreign currency pricing has picked up enough momentum to extend beyond its initial launch to more than 350 correspondent banks globally.

Companies are scrambling to shore up Brexit strategies to ensure their payment systems work, a difficult if not impossible task given the political uncertainty. But it’s also an unavoidable complication, which Tipalti hopes will provide a boost for its service, which is built to expect uncertainty.

The slow U.S. adoption of real-time payments hurts half of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck, says Aaron Klein, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

China dwarfs the U.S. market in e-commerce adoption and is likely to be soon giving lessons to internet executive from U.S. and Western countries.

As the cross-border B2B payments segment drives new activity among partners and investors, TransferMate has teamed up with Tradeshift, a startup specializing in payments within the supply-chain marketplace.

If competitors continue to seek ways to one-up the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications messaging system for cross-border transactions, there is mounting evidence — and numbers — that many banks are comfortable with Swift's modern processes.

Hong Kong's mobile wallet AlipayHK has expanded to enable cross-border payments for the first time in Japan and other regions of the Greater Bay Area.

The cross-border B2B payments startup is introducing a rewards program to help drive repeat usage and expand its network.

Alipay is a force to be reckoned with outside of China, but it has taken a strategic approach to foreign markets that downplays its potential as a threat to local payment systems.

JPMorgan's blockchain effort could lead to solutions that overcome industry skepticism and regulatory concerns and perhaps attract more mainstream retail interest.

JPMorgan is prototyping its own digital currency to be used for cross-border payments and, later, other purposes. Will banks find this a palatable alternative to today's most well-known options?

JPM Coin is not meant for consumer payments, but rather is a specific technology for a specific use case that the bank controls. Its value comes not from JPM Coin's appeal, but from JPMorgan's titanic wholesale payments business.

While many public policy initiatives focus on the 1.7 billion “unbanked,” we rarely hear about the nearly 1 billion people who do have a bank account and a smartphone but have no credit card nor cross-border-enabled debit, writes Eric Rosenthal, managing director of the Americas at Rapyd.

If MoneyGram couldn't be taken under the wings of Ant Financial, which operates China's Alipay wallet, it is doing the next best thing.