South Asia

Why Global Financial Inclusion Programs Fail
November 18, 2014

For well over a decade, players across the payments space and all around the world have been trying to crack the code on delivering mobile financial services to the un-and-underbanked consumer. And despite many great ideas and the urgent need to move those without bank...

Mobile Payment Startup Taps Into Indian Villages
November 18, 2014

Ezetap, a mobile payment startup, wants to connect small Indian villages with business and is using its mPoS to do so, Business Standard reported. This three-year old Bangalore-based company, which is supported by investors like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, said its mobile payment solution for small...

B2B Payments
Mass Payments And The Global Marketplace
November 18, 2014

Managing the “dozens of ACH islands” that exist around the worldwide in order to pay hundreds or even thousands of payments to suppliers is typically time consuming and expensive. But that’s exactly the problem that Chen Amit, set out to solve four years ago when...

BofA Merrill Boosts Global Cards
November 05, 2014

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has added some significant new global features for its B2B cards, including expanded country footprints (adding Guatemala and Turkey), real-time account management and integrated global data consolidation in Hong Kong and India, additional B2B payment options in 27 more countries...

B2B Payments
Why Alibaba Says It’s Nothing Like Amazon
November 05, 2014

Alibaba is discovering that the Chinese and U.S. E-Commerce marketplace present their own set of challenges, particularly when looking at the urban versus rural market audiences, but the Chinese E-commerce giant believes tapping into a niche market, like farmers, can help boost its online users and sales growth....

Europe
Remittance Volume Up 5 Percent
October 07, 2014

Remittances to developing countries are expected to reach $435 billion this year, representing a 5 percent increase over 2013. Remittances also grew faster this year–in 2013, the annual growth rate was around 3.4 percent. The main drivers for growth were Asia and South America. The...

Europe
Q3 2014 Strongest IPO Market In Years (With Or Without Alibaba)
October 02, 2014

The three months through September were still the busiest for IPOs in four years and would have been even if Alibaba had never set foot in the U.S. and gone public. “Alibaba breathed even more life into the IPO market,” said Liz Myers, global head...

Europe
Non-Cash Transactions On The Rise Globally
October 01, 2014

Non-cash payments ticked up 10 percent in 2013 to 366 billion transactions, pulled along by intense growth in developing markets. According to RBS data, nearly a quarter of all global non-cash transaction growth–that’s about 93 billion transactions–happened in those developing markets.  China remains less developed...

International
iPhone6 Sales Greenlighted In China
October 01, 2014

The Chinese government is officially allowing Apple to start selling the iPhone 6/6 Plus in China after extracting a privacy promise from Apple “that it would never allow any country or government agency backdoor access to its devices or user data,” according to a report...