Cross border payments

CBDC tests in Japan, real-time payments in Singapore and India, and more. Here's what's happening around the world.

United Arab Emirates plans to launch a central bank digital currency this year; Adyen adds travel payment cards; and more.

Bank of England releases digital pound details, CBA adds anti-scam tech, and more. Here's what's happening around the world.

About two dozen banks in the U.S. and Europe, including ABN Amro and Bank of America, are working with The Clearing House and EBA Clearing, using technology from SWIFT, to make instant international transactions ubiquitous for business and e-commerce sales.

Several central banks and the Bank for International Settlements have developed prototypes for a common digital currencies platform that has the potential to make cross-border payments more efficient.

The California bank will let customers of a neobank called BayaniPay Wallet use its branches.

Hispanic adults are underbanked compared with their white counterparts, according to the Federal Reserve. Challenger banks such as Tend and Viva First are reaching out to this population with bilingual services and low-cost money transfers.

The payments firm Boku is uniting hundreds of fragmented mobile apps to compete with Visa and Mastercard for unbanked consumers in different regions of the world.

The London neobank, which has applied for a banking charter in California, is working to undercut banks on pricing for consumer payments to Mexico.

The blockchain company's new lead on the Continent, Sendi Young, discusses its plans to foster real-time and cross-border transactions between banks and fintechs in ways that aren't possible on legacy networks.

Cheri McGuire, who previously held roles at Standard Chartered, Microsoft and Symantec, will oversee Swift’s core infrastructure as it speeds up its cross-border transactions.

Swift Go is designed for businesses and consumers to send cross-border transactions under $10,000 at more competitive rates.

MoneyGram International, one of the largest money-transfer services in the U.S., has received preliminary takeover interest from Stellar Development Foundation and the private equity firm Advent International, according to people familiar with the matter.

In a move it says will cut friction in cross-border payments, Swift is launching a real-time validation service for banks to check and confirm payee details related to the payment beneficiary prior to moving the transaction.

Six major international banks have committed to preparations for and testing of Swift's new transaction management platform, a process designed to enable new services, improve efficiency and reduce costs for international payments.

Roxe says the distributed ledger technology that removes costly middlemen from international transactions can also lower expenses for currency conversions.

Six Clovers, a digital payments company founded by two former PayPal developers, designed its Rapid platform to enable fast cross-border transactions using cryptocurrencies backed by government-issued money.

The data analytics provider has deployed cloud hosting to scour international payments for signs of fraud and money laundering.