Apple, Paypal, SoftBank, Wechat, Mastercard, Stripe
- Apple has announced that Discover and Wells Fargo are among the businesses supporting the roll-out of a new business chat application in iMessage, which allows users to have a text conversation with merchants and process payments from the same screen. Business Chat is set to launch in Beta with the public availability of iOS 11.3 this spring.
- PayPal has released an instant transfer feature that lets consumers send money from Venmo to their debit cards within minutes, instead of the standard one to three days. The feature costs users $0.25
- SoftBank, the Japanese technology giant, is reportedly studying a plan to create a global digital payments system that could take on PayPal, Apple Pay and China’s Alipay
- WeChat Pay has started allowing cards issued outside of China to be loaded into its platform. The option will be available to expatriates living in China and ‘Greater China’ and to residents from Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and will apply to cards issued by JCB, Mastercard and Visa. WeChat has launched WeChat Pay, its digital payment service, in Italy
- Mastercard has said that EU regulatory requirements on authentication coming into force through PSD2 mean that banks across the continent must offer biometric identification options by April 2019. Mastercard Identity Check, which lets people use biometric identifiers such as fingerprint, iris and facial recognition to verify their identity, is already available in 37 countries
- Stripe has stopped providing support for Bitcoin payments. Stripe said Bitcoin users now saw the virtual currency as ‘asset’ to be traded, rather than something to make payments with, while fewer online merchants wanted to accept the cryptocurrency
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