Tag: Europe

Visa Partners with Worldpay to Launch Visa Direct in Europe

Eligible European Worldpay merchants can now leverage Visa’s technology and global reach to convert domestic and cross-border payments (in real time) for consumers and businesses worldwide.

It’s Facebook Official: Social Media Giant Receives Payments License for Europe

Facebook has received a license from the Central Bank of Ireland to serve as an electronic money institution in Europe.

The broad nature of Facebook’s existing user base – globally, the company has an average of 1.18 billion daily active users – may give it an advantage over any competitors looking to establish alternative payment schemes in Europe. But the fact that it is a social network first and a payment entity much later means the company needs to be very careful.

PSD2 Creates Opportunity for New Wave of European PFs

Europe is undergoing a step change in banking and payment services, leveraging open API technology and new regulatory frameworks to make a historically cumbersome industry more competitive, secure and customer-friendly.

The goal? “Customer first” digital banking and Europe-wide faster payments to drive innovation and increase cross-border trade in a European B2C e-commerce market worth over 425 billion euros.

Alipay To Begin Conquest Of Munich And Beyond

In two weeks, Chinese tourists landing at Munich Airport will be able to use coupons sent to them through their mobile devices by retailers in the terminals. They will get a notification, directions to the retailer with the coupon, then once they bring the item to the POS, have a bar code scanned without worrying over currency conversion.

Alipay, a mobile payment app run by Alibaba partner Ant Financial, will be accepted in all POS terminals run by German processor Wirecard, which struck a deal with the company that operates 69 shops inside the airport. Markus Eichinger, head of mobile services at Wirecard, which is acting as both acquiring bank and processor for Alipay, gave an interview to paymentfacilitator.com just after coming from the partnership’s final testing session.

Why Did Most Merchants Miss The EMV Deadline? Many Reasons, But Complexity Is The Top

With the liability shift and October already here, where are all the EMV-compliant merchants? Many are still waiting for software updates. And why is that, given how many years everyone has known about the October 2015 cutover? Seems that the U.S. payments processing space is a lot more complicated than even the payment itself realized, according to Randy Vanderhoof, who, as executive director of the Smart Card Alliance, is the industry’s chief EMV cheerleader.

Vanderhoof concedes that most U.S. merchants—60-65 percent, he said—are not EMV compliant today and he blames that on several factors, but payments complexity—and good old-fashioned procrastination—are at the top of his list. “The U.S. market is the most complex payments processing market in the world because we have multiple parties involved in managing the retail POS systems and multiple parties engaged in the processing and acquiring of payment transactions,” Vanderhoof said. “In other countries, other markets, the major banks who were then issuers were also the acquirers so they owned the terminals in those merchant locations. They invested in the cards and the terminals and their own banking acquiring network. In the U.S., financial institutions are separated from the merchants and acquirers. This means that there needs to be independent investments and alignments.”