Asia

WeChat, China’s most popular social media and messaging service, has launched a new bid in Europe and the U.S. to develop its payments offering and win new advertisers.

The next phase of India’s national digital payments initiative begins next month when 20 banks launch Aadhaar Pay, an app enabling merchants to accept payments on smartphones from consumers using biometric authentication.

Swedish startup Truecaller has become the newest entrant in India’s busy digital payments space, via a tie-up with ICICI Bank Ltd. to offer a local mobile-payments service.

Mastercard and Samsung India have partnered to roll out Samsung Pay to millions of customers of Indian banks.

Banks are asking Hong Kong property agents to stop accepting China-issued UnionPay cards, as mainland authorities escalate their crackdown on capital flows out of the country.

Mastercard has named longtime exec Rama Sridhar to the newly created role of executive vice president, digital and emerging partnerships for the Asia Pacific region.

Tencent Holdings Ltd. is planning to spin off its e-book business as it boosts spending on payments and content to lure users and keep them glued to its WeChat service.

Ingenico ePayments, the online and mobile commerce division of France's Ingenico, has signed an agreement with Air China to accept Discover Card payments in North America, a key market for the Beijing-based airline, with plans to expand to other regions later this year.

Chillr, one of India’s growing number of mobile payment apps enabling person-to-person payments between customers of different banks, is expanding to 45 banks in the country.

Flipkart Online Services Pvt has completed a $1 billion fundraising and aims to raise as much as $1 billion more over the next few months, according to people familiar with the matter, giving India’s largest e-commerce company capital to battle back against rising competition.