Alipay partners with VTB to expand merchant network in Russia
Alipay announced its partnership with VTB Group, one of Russia’s leading banking groups. VTB Group has recently started merchant acquiring for Alipay payments service in its over-120,000-POS-device network, which now makes VTB Group the biggest partner of Alipay in Russia. It is expected that more than 1 million Chinese travelers will benefit from the new partnership every year.
The service will be launched shortly after a pilot program in August. Q3-Q4 2017 will see its roll-out to the whole VTB network of near 100,000 merchants.
Tantalum announce connected car agreement with SAP
Tantalum Corporation announced an agreement with SAP to integrate SAP Vehicles Network into Tantalum’s Pay. Car end-to-end payment platform for connected cars, making it easier for motorists to find and pay for services with just one click.
Starting with parking, Pay.Car with SAP Vehicles Network will help drivers to find an available parking space quickly and pay securely without needing to find spare coins or load a separate app on their phone.
Earthport opens cross-border payment services into Nigeria
Earthport is announce that it has partnered with Access Bank Plc, one of Africa’s foremost financial institutions, to provide delivery of cross-border payment services into Nigeria. Access Bank Plc is one of Nigeria’s leading financial institutions and has a strong focus on servicing the Nigerian diaspora.
This new payment channel has been created in direct response to the need for more effective servicing of remittances and low-value payments sourced from outside the country, which now total an estimated US$19 billion per year1, representing 4.7% of the country’s GDP2.
Monzo’s boss sent a mail to all users to make apology
“I sent the following email to all Monzo cardholders: I’m writing to apologise for the recent card outages you’ve experienced over the last week.
Our card processor has been experiencing technical issues that they haven’t yet been able to solve and so on several occasions card payments have failed, in the same way they did back in March. These incidents have lasted anywhere from a couple of minutes to over an hour (on Tuesday evening).
These issues may continue for at least the next few days, so please ensure you carry a backup card with you from another bank. Unfortunately, we don’t know how long it will take our card processor to fix the issues, but we will always keep our status page up to date.”
Chase extends partnership with OnDeck
JPMorgan Chase and OnDeck announced a contract extension to continue their collaboration on the bank’s digital small business lending product, Chase Business Quick Capital, for up to four years. Chase Business Quick Capital simplifies the way small business customers access credit by offering loans for up to $200,000 and with a term of up to 24 months. Chase small business clients can apply in minutes, decisioning occurs in seconds and funds are received the same or next-day. OnDeck will continue to provide technology enablement to support the delivery of Chase’s online lending product.
“We want to be the easiest bank for small businesses to work with, and part of that is simplifying delivery of our products so they have more time to run their businesses,” said Andrew Kresse, CEO of Chase Business Banking.
