Asia

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.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to consider changes that would allow consumers to block calls from numbers not on their contacts list while the House should vote to extend the National Flood Insurance Program.

One credit union economist says tit-for-tat on tariffs could slow economic growth but will not result in an economic downturn.

While the European Union positions itself as one common, homogeneous market, the reality is that the European e-commerce market is very diverse with both leaders and laggards.