Cross border payments

Calling it a first in international payments, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication [Swift] is providing a cross-border, real-time payments tracker for banks handling global transactions.

The U.K.’s Payment Systems Regulator is escalating its inquiry into the role banks play in preventing money-transfer scams where consumers are tricked into sending funds to fraudsters.

Ant Financial, China’s largest provider of internet financial services, will continue investing in mobile-payment providers around the world to boost offshore revenue and buttress itself from rising competition and tighter regulation at home.

MoneyGram’s stockholders have voted to approve a deal to be purchased by China’s Ant Financial for $1.2 billion.

U.S. payment companies frustrated by Chinese regulations blocking direct access to its vast consumer market could get a break under the terms of a new U.S.-China trade deal.

Stellar, which started as a splinter group from Ripple, has formed a for-profit company called Lightyear.io to help financial institutions integrate its software.

Alipay wants to leverage the millions of Chinese customers who travel abroad by offering them services in different parts of the world.

The company's original markets are India and China, but it plans to reach 10 major markets for B-to-B cross-border payments in the next year.

FleetCor Technologies, with broad operations in fleet cards and payroll solutions, has announced plans to purchase Cambridge Global Payments, which specializes in cross-border business-to-business payments, for $675 million.

U.K.-based TransferWise has enabled online customer verification at its new Asia Pacific base in Singapore, so users need not visit an office to set up an account with TransferWise's cross-border funds-transfer service.

In working with correspondent banks in developing countries for more than two decades, INTL FCStone Ltd. spent a fair amount of time collecting market information over the phone and through e-mail from those banks to share with others. It ultimately determined there was a better way to do this.

The B-to-B payments market is ripe for digital innovation. Here are some of the most recent moves to bring B-to-B payments up to speed.

While Germany's Wirecard AG in recent years has been steadily racking up a deep portfolio of payments technology fused with banking services through a white-label approach, it has also quietly established a global business through acquisition.

TransferWise Ltd., the London-based startup backed by investors including Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, is bringing its international money transfer service to Singapore, aiming to shake up banks’ dominance of the market.

There has been a lot of activity lately around modernizing cross-border transfers through the use of blockchain and and cloud-hosted technology, but despite the potential savings in cost and time, none of these methods has caused a meaningful decline in the use of cash.

Kosta Peric, deputy director of digital payments and financial services for the poor at the Gates Foundation, discusses his efforts to expand access to low-cost financial services in developing countries.

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.