Visa+ will not require users to have a Visa card; instead, by setting up a personalized payment address linked to their Venmo or PayPal account, individuals using either app will be able to receive and send payments quickly and securely between the platforms.

As part of a joint effort to build interoperability across payment platforms, Visa partners DailyPay, i2c, TabaPay and Western Union, will also integrate Visa+ within their platforms. Through this collaboration, Visa+ will expand its reach and enable more use cases, including gig, creator and marketplace payouts. Participating digital wallets, neo-banks and other payment apps, reaching millions of US users, will be able to enable interoperability through Visa+.

Read more: Visa

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Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app that lets you send and receive money instantly from a mobile app. It has added more features over time, such as debit cards, IBANs, money pools, cashback, donations, personal loans, etc.

Read more: TechCrunch

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Read more: TechCrunch

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The decision to permit WhatsApp to again facilitate transactions in Brazil has come nine months after the service had been suspended.

In June of last year, Brazil notably became the first country to carry out a countrywide launch of WhatsApp’s P2P payments platform. However, only 10 days after the launch, the Brazilian reserve bank decided to shut down the service, while asking Visa and Mastercard to suspend their plans to provide payments and transfers via WhatsApp.

Read more: Crowdfund Insider

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The Mountain View, California-based company partnered with Citi and Stanford Federal Credit Union to launch the mobile bank accounts and said it plans to add 11 new partner institutions next year. Google Pay will also let users send peer-to-peer payments.

Google said its “Plex” checking and savings accounts have no monthly fees, overdraft charges or minimum balance requirements. Users can also request a physical debit card, which will run on Mastercard’s network.

Read more: CNBC

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Read more on on the topic: Bitcoin.com

The post UK Digital Bank Ziglu Launches P2P Payments for Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Square  acquired Verse, a Spanish peer-to-peer payment app that works across Europe. Terms of the deal are undisclosed. According to Crunchbase, Verse had raised $37.6 million from Spark Capital, eVentures, Greycroft Partners and others.

Square has attracted a ton of users with Cash App, its peer-to-peer payment app that lets you easily send and receive money from your phone. But Cash App  has only been available in the U.S. and the U.K.

Acquiring Verse  seems like a good fit to expand Square’s presence in Europe. Verse’s team will join the Cash App division within Square.

There are many similarities between Cash App and Verse. Verse’s main feature is that it lets you send and receive money from a mobile app. Users don’t pay any fees and transfers occur in just a few seconds.

Verse users sign up with their phone numbers, which means that you can send money to other users as long as you have their phone numbers in your address book. If you don’t have enough money on your Verse account, the app can charge your debit card directly. And if you want to withdraw money from your Verse account, you can transfer your balance to your bank account.

You can also track group expenses from the app (like Splitwise), create money pots and organize events with a basic ticketing feature.

More recently, Verse launched a Visa debit card in Spain, which lets you spend money on your Verse account directly. You don’t pay any foreign exchange fees and you get two free ATM withdrawals per month. Verse uses Visa’s exchange rate.

While the startup hasn’t shared usage numbers for a while, according to App Annie, it is currently the No. 247 most downloaded app in the App Store in Spain across all categories. Peer-to-peer payment is a fragmented market. For instance, French startup Lydia has 3 million users in France.

“At this point, our main priority is enabling Verse to continue their successful growth in Europe. Verse will continue to operate as an independent business, working out of their offices with no immediate changes to their existing products, customers, or business operations,” Square wrote in the announcement.

The three most important words in this statement are “at this point.” Square doesn’t want to fix what isn’t broken. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Verse slowly evolves to become Cash App in Europe.

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After months of talks and trials, WhatsApp  has finally pulled the trigger on payments in its app. Today the Facebook-owned messaging service announced that users in Brazil would be the first to be able to send and receive money by way of its messaging app, using Facebook Pay, the payments service WhatsApp owner Facebook  launched last year.

WhatsApp says in its blog post that the payments service — which currently is free for consumers to use (that is, no commission fee taken) but businesses pay a 3.99% processing fee to receive payments — will work by way of a six-digit PIN or fingerprint to complete transactions.

You use it by linking up your WhatsApp account to your Visa or Mastercard credit or debit card, with initial local partners including Banco do Brasil, Nubank and Sicredi. Cielo, a payments processor, is also working with WhatsApp to complete transactions. “We have built an open model to welcome more partners in the future,” it noted.

The news comes as bit of a surprise. WhatsApp had been testing its payments service among users in India for months (that trial uses another system, not Facebook Pay but UPI), so many assumed that the world’s second largest internet market would be the debut region for the service.

But Facebook remains stuck in a regulatory maze in India that has prevented it from expanding the payments service beyond a small, limited launch, in what is otherwise the app’s biggest market in terms of users. India has 400 million monthly active users, while second-largest market Brazil has 120 million MAUs.

(And indeed, it would have an interesting position there because of that size: While there are a number of other digital payments services, including Google Pay and Paytm, there are no clear, large and popular competitors offering payments within a messaging app in the country.)

WhatsApp had been adopted informally for commercial purposes almost from the very start: Small business owners have used it to exchange messages with users around the sale of goods, what is in stock and so on. But under the wing of Facebook — which acquired the company in 2014 for $19 billion — WhatsApp started in earnest the big task of bringing in a more formal set of business services.

That’s included the launch of WhatsApp Business, which lets SMBs post catalogues and stock links within the app; advertisers on Facebook also can create links through to their WhatsApp accounts.

But now with payments, WhatsApp, which has amassed over 2 billion users, is finally taking a more comprehensive commercial plunge, giving people not just a place to chat about a product, or even send payment details, but now to actually transact.

And that, in turn, gives WhatsApp and Facebook another shot at building a revenue stream based on its vast scale, one which does not turn the app over to monetising its users through ads and the data that is amassed around them — the primary business model today behind Facebook and Instagram, another major app in the Facebook stable.

“Payments on WhatsApp are beginning to roll out to people across Brazil beginning today and we look forward to bringing it to everyone as we go forward,” the company said.

Users in Brazil will be able to use the payments service on WhatsApp to make purchases from local businesses without leaving their chat, the Facebook-owned service said.

“The over 10 million small and micro businesses are the heartbeat of Brazil’s communities. It’s become second nature to send a zap to a business to get questions answered. Now in addition to viewing a store’s catalog, customers will be able to send payments for products as well,” the company wrote in a blog post.

Although WhatsApp has in theory been working on payments for years, from what we understand there were a lot of delays in part due to how and where Facebook wanted WhatsApp to implement it. Now that it’s launching with Facebook Pay, it seems that we know how that struggle landed.

As for subsequent regions for launching the service, it’s not clear whether Facebook will be open to working with other kinds of payment methods, or even other payment rails beyond Facebook Pay, or what kinds of use cases it will pursue for the service — although the trial in India, using UPI, implies that it won’t just be a one-size-fits-all approach.

These remain critical questions, considering that payment cards and even bank accounts are not necessarily the norm in every market, especially emerging markets; and that other kinds of transactions such as remittances — where people transfer money to friends, family and businesses that are often far away — are some of the more popular uses of phones beyond simple calls and texts. (And as we’ve been saying for years, the link between messaging and remittances is a big one: messaging apps are where people carry out their relationships and communication, so they are a natural place to stay to send money.) The examples of payments in Brazil indicate that remittances are very much on Facebook’s radar, so we’ll see how and where it actually gets used.

Image Credits: WhatsApp

A WhatsApp spokesperson declined to say more when asked for more specific details about future plans beyond Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s “More to come soon!”, from his own announcement. But given the link with Facebook Pay, one obvious guess might be that we’ll see payments rolled out in WhatsApp in markets where the former service is now live, which include the US and UK.“We’re continuing to roll out Facebook Pay on Facebook to more countries outside the U.S. for existing payment experiences, which vary by country and may include experiences such as in-game purchases and fundraisers where already available,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “As we’ve said previously, our goal is to bring Facebook Pay to more people and places over time.”

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The Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Limited (OCBC) Bank, a multinational banking and financial services corporation, has reportedly become the first company to introduce Google Pay’s peer to peer (P2P) money transfer service in Singapore.

The new digital payments option makes Singapore only the third country, following India and the United States, where the Google Pay P2P service is being offered.

OCBC has added Google Pay to PayNow, the Singapore-based P2P payments portal supported by the city-state’s financial institutions.

Customers now have the option of installing the Google Pay app onto their smartphones. It works for both Android and iOS operating systems. The app may be used to conduct instant transactions via PayNow.

Customers can transfer funds from their current or savings accounts. They can send money to anyone in their contacts list, who has linked their bank accounts to their mobile phone numbers.

Ching Wei Hong, head of global wealth management and consumer banking at OCBC, stated:

“Singaporeans continue to significantly increase their use of PayNow, with more than 70 million transactions worth S$12.16 billion in 2019. We believe that our partnership with Google Pay will continue to help drive this trend in 2020 and beyond.”

Caesar Sengupta, vice president of payments and the Next Billion Users initiatives at Google, noted:

“It was a pleasure working with the team to design and build Google Pay for Singapore so customers can provision their OCBC Bank accounts and leverage the national rails – via PayNow – for transactions.”

In December 2019, companies based in Singapore were allowed to instantly open a business banking account with the OCBC Bank.

Local startups can now open an OCBC account right after incorporation, instead of waiting one business day. Accounts can be opened almost instantly now because of a new API interface between OCBC Bank and Experian, a global information services company.

After a company is incorporated, OCBC Bank can use Experian’s platform to verify the firm’s business profile, which is issued and monitored by the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (Acra).

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RateSetter states that over 500,000 people have invested or borrowed with RateSetter.  More than 65,000 people have RateSetter investment accounts and investors have provided finance to more than 460,000 borrowers, with more than £1.55 billion lent to individuals and almost £950 million lent to businesses.

Peter Behrens, RateSetter’s Chief Lending Officer, commented on the accomplishment;

“We are very proud that we’ve helped more than half a million investors and borrowers access better interest rates on the £2.5 billion of lending that has been delivered through the RateSetter platform. Reaching this milestone shows how deep and broad our marketplace has become in space of just eight years, and we look forward with great excitement to helping even more people access investment in loans as we work towards the next £2.5 billion of lending.”

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