Tag Archives: Payments & Commerce

While Facebook is prepping for its Libra launch in 2020, it also has acquired ServiceFriend which is a start-up that builds bots. Experts already have speculated that this is possibly meant for the Calibra wallet support service. First, this news was published in an Israel where ServiceFriend is situated. One of its largest investors, Roberto Singler, alerted one of the local publications about this matter. While Facebook hasn’t yet approved the relevance to Calibra on this deal,...

Social media giant Facebook has for the first time indicated the full list of the basket of currencies which will support the proposed stablecoin Libra. While is known publicly that the US Dollar accounts for about 50% of the basket of currencies that will back the cryptocurrency, not much was known about the rest.According to the Der Spiegel report , in response to a request from Fabio De Masi who is the finance spokesperson of the Left Party of the German Parliament (the Bundestag), a...

Payments giant Stripe announced they will be raising $250 million in funding at a pre-money valuation of $35 billion. This happened only a week after they launched some new services and now, the money they want to raise, they want to use for growing on the international level (that includes adding more new payment products and even start working with larger companies).More importantly, proud to now be working with Airbnb, Wayfair, GitHub, Twilio and The Real Real!Lots more in the works. The...

Easily the largest e-commerce platform in the world, Amazon has decided to give its customers a new cash-focused way to pay for their online shopping even as the world moves into cashless transactions. According to an official press release, Amazon PayCode will now be available to residents in the US who will be able to pay for already-made orders on Amazon.com, at one of many physical Western Union branches nationwide.The partnership between Amazon and Western Union kicked off a few months...

Things aren’t so great in the FedEx camp at the moment as the express shipping and logistics firm fell short of expectations on Wall Street for its first fiscal quarter of the year, which ended in August. This has led the firm to also lower its general expectations for its possible earnings for next year to between $10 and $12 in earnings per share. Due to this, FedEx stock’s (FDX) after-hours trading fell more than 9%.Based on the report posted for the quarter, the company reportedly pulled...

Fintech startups across the globe are making massive inroads in the global payments industry. As per the Accenture report titled Banking Pulse Survey: Two Ways To Win, non-banking financial startups will eat 15% share in global payments revenue by 2025. As per the estimates and the growth projections, this share translates to a massive $280 billion.As per the report, the global payments revenue is expected to grow at an annual rate of 5.5%. In 2019 itself, the global payments market is...

It seems that France decided to go rigorous on Facebook’s Libra by entirely blocking the development of it. When Facebook announced their Libra project in June this year, they called it a “global currency and financial infrastructure powered by a version of blockchain – the technology that underpins Bitcoin”.However, a lot of governments were really against even the idea and France was the harshest of them all. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire then called out on Libra saying it...

As part of an email sent to customers recently, Google has now announced that it will be closing down its online shopping platform, Google Express, sometime in the next few weeks. The functions available on the platform will now be on-boarded with a new version dubbed Google Shopping.Back in May, the company announced a new and redesigned Google Shopping platform which will include a universal shopping cart of sorts, embedded with the company’s other offerings including Images, Search and...

Mastercard and fintech firm R3 have entered a partnership to develop a solution that will enable cross-border payments which include localized payments and interbank settlements and clearing of payment obligations. The solution will have a primary focus on connecting financial payment systems.Mastercard earlier this year has expanded its payment system with its acquisition of Transfast. This greatly improved its ability to clear transactions on a global scale as Transfast has operations and...

Prolific Billionaire Jack Ma has stepped down as Chairman of Alibaba. After twenty years which has seen one of the biggest technology giants come from zero to hero, Ma has been one of the defining icons of the technology industry since the early days when no one thought that technology would be either this big or go this far in defining the human existence.He would remain on the board until the next Shareholders Annual General Meeting when it is expected that he will step down from the board...