Asia

India’s soaring digital payments market has prompted Mastercard and Visa to increase their investments in India, targeting one of the world’s largest cash displacement opportunities while complying with local regulations such as expensive data store requirements.

Banks are rightly focused on PSD2 as an international gateway for fintechs to disrupt banking, though potential deregulation in Singapore can give digital payment companies another route to take share directly away from banks.

Facebook grabbed the spotlight this week with the announcement of its Libra cryptocurrency initiative, and its list of high-profile supporters suggests that it's the only game in town. But banks have their own projects in the works.

Spanish bank BBVA and duty-free travel retailer Dufry are partnering to accept mobile payments from China's WeChat Pay at the Madrid airport.

Singapore ride-hailing giant Grab held talks to acquire payments provider 2C2P Pte and was turned down, according to people familiar with the matter, a sign of the ambitions Southeast Asia’s most valuable startup has in financial services.

India’s government has taken drastic steps to encourage and standardize digital transactions, and those moves appear to be paying off.

The Australian API payments and rewards platform provider Verrency has closed on a $7 million (AU$10 million) Series A funding round, bringing the total funds raised to-date to $14 million (AU$20 million).

The ride-sharing heavyweights Uber and Grab built their markets by making payments seamless, and their expansion plans are similarly hooked into improving payments and other financial services.

European mobile wallet providers Bluecode, ePassi, Momo pocket, Pagaqui, Pivo, and Vipps are working together with China's Alipay for the first time to promote a unified, interoperable QR code that would connect Europe's current fragmented mobile payment landscape.

China UnionPay is assembling the relationships it needs to directly issue cards in Europe, but local saturation suggests UnionPay’s best bet is to use European merchant relationships to counter its own domestic rivals in China rather than disrupting Visa and Mastercard.