Tag Archives: Payments & Commerce

Bunq, a fintech startup mobile bank that provides accounts and other financial services, will be spreading its services to another 22 regions, pushing the number of countries it operates in, all the way to 30. The company, based in Amsterdam, will also be supporting both Apple Pay and Google Pay for all of its customers with Travel Cards in certain countries including Spain, Italy, Belgium, France, Ireland, and the Netherlands.The Bunq company, which already operates in the above countries,...

Revolut, a British financial technology company that offers banking services, has signed a new deal with payments giant Visa. As a result, Revolut will expand its services to 24 new markets, or a total of 56 around the world, and hire 3500 employees.Under the terms of the agreement, Revolut will primarily issue Visa-branded cards in the global expansion. As Reuters reports, Visa will initially enable Revolut to launch in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Russia, Singapore and the...

Back in 2016, e-commerce giant Amazon announced its plans to establish a large chain of convenience stores in the United States. Called Amazon Go, the stores are mostly automated and run on computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion without cashiers, allowing customers to grab items they need to from the store, and simply walk out.Since inception, Amazon has opened 16 Amazon Go stores with several of them in Washington, Illinois, California and New York and the company still...

Libra Association Managing Director Bertrand Perez said on Friday that the Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra, that should be launched by a Geneva-based association next year, is not intended to replace existing currencies. He said:“We are not in the area of implementing any monetary policy with the (Libra) Reserve.”This confirms what Libra’s CEO David Marcus was speaking back in July at the hearings when he kept stressing that Libra is not an investment and it doesn’t want to conquer the...

Cryptocurrency startup Flexa is part of a project that will allow for technological innovations in retailing. With a pilot project at Mall of America Minnesota Minneapolis, which is the largest mall in the United States at the moment, the demo store is to serve as a proof-of-concept that new technologies are possible in the real world.Flexa is participating in the project but serving in a technical advisory role will be on display with other non-cryptocurrency-based technologies. The store...

A rather inspiring presentation from the head of Facebook’s Libra David Marcus seems to have inspired someone else as well and neither more nor less – Coinbase CEO himself. Yes, you’ve heard it right, Brian Armstrong came out as a real supporter of this, still developing stablecoin.The thing is that Libra is often represented as a project that carries labels such as “alienating”, “controversial” or even “poisonous”. Even though it still hasn’t come out at the light of the day, it has already...

Speaking to the German federal parliament Bundestag on Wednesday, Benoit Coeure, a member of the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB) said that Facebook’s currency Libra could possibly fix some of the troubling issues that exist at the international payments market. However, he warned that, on the other hand, it might create other problems that will need regulators to act more liberal and creative. He said:“Libra has undoubtedly been a wakeup call for central banks and...

Fidel, a fintech startup based in the United Kingdom – which provides developers with a functional application programming interface (API) for building new offers on networks belonging to major card companies – has just successfully pulled in $18 million in its recently concluded Series A funding round.The funding round was led by two venture capital firms based in the U.S., QED Investors and Nyca Partners. Other participants include 500 Startups, Horizons Ventures, Commerce VC, Citi...

Crypto payments seem to have achieved mainstream use: in France, 30 famous brands are going to launch support for Bitcoin payments. By early 2020, over 25,000 sales points will allow their customers to make purchases in Bitcoin. Among the retailers that will support the initiative are sportswear giant Decathlon, sneakers emporium Foot Locker, cosmetics store Sephora, furnishings retail chain Conforama, design company Moustache and more.The news has been announced during Paris Retail Week on...

After the close of a successful deal, a third of Jack Ma’s online financial services provider, Ant Financial, is now owned and controlled by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (BABA). The deal is more than a few years in the making as it was first proposed that both giant companies initiate much stronger collaborative efforts more than five years ago. Both companies were started by Ma.Originally starting as Alipay, Ant Financial was founded back in 2004 and by 2013, it had overtaken PayPal as the...