Mobile wallets

Many companies seek ways to maintain their payments and collections functions centrally when expanding overseas, whether regionally or globally wherever possible, to avoid fragmented processes and technology, says Standard Chartered's Tarek Elyafi.

Argentina’s Ualá, the mobile payments startup backed by heavyweight billionaire investors George Soros and Steve Cohen, is launching its prepaid card operations in Mexico.

Embedded finance isn't new, but the influence of online payments and banking creates vast new scale, says Kunai's Sandeep Sood.

The startup said its Marqeta Tokenization-as-a-Service enables banks or fintechs to instantly add credit, debit or prepaid cards to a digital wallet by directly managing tokens instead of going through a third party.

COVID-19 has accelerated changes in payments behavior that would otherwise have taken years to occur, laying the foundation for global expansion post-pandemic. But for different parts of the world, this digital transformation had very different outcomes.

The agency issued an interpretive letter on stablecoins two months after permitting institutions to provide wallet services for cryptocurrency holdings.

The pandemic and subsequent economic crisis have raised the stakes, since the government’s role in recovery and how stimulus is delivered — and policies impacting the goals of card and technology companies — will be largely determined by the philosophy of leadership.

The Trump administration has barred the use of TikTok and WeChat inside the U.S., including a direct ban on WeChat Pay, setting up potential retaliation against U.S. companies that could interrupt international payment flows.

The humble QR code — invented for automobile manufacturing in 1994 — had been on the rise as a payment method for many years, but the pandemic expanded its use in the U.S. in some unforeseen ways.

In countries where the use of cards is less prevalent, other digital payment methods, particularly mobile wallets, are proliferating, changing the payments landscape rapidly and radically, says Standard Chartered's Tarek Elyafi.