Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 6 March 2018
Alipay makes Canadian inroads through Motion Pay partnership
Alipay, the digital payment platform operated by Ant Financial Services Group, announced that its partnership with Motion Pay Technology Inc. (Motion Pay) has resulted in a significant number of merchants across Canada enabling Alipay at point-of-sale.
Motion Pay is a Canadian-based fintech company that empowers Canadian merchants to accept Chinese payments.
Through the partnership, Alipay is now accepted in all major cities in Canada including Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, Banff, among others, and across several categories including retail, restaurants, hospitality, and luxury.
“We are thrilled with the success of our partnership with Motion Pay to date, which has played an instrumental role in our growth across Canada this past year,” said Souheil Badran, President of Alipay, Americas. “As our first Canadian partner, Motion Pay has helped us to reach critical mass in acceptance points across Canada. We look forward to continuing our relationship and enabling even more Canadian brands and retailers to connect with the growing number of Chinese consumers seeking items they can’t find at home, and simplifying payments by offering Alipay’s familiar method.”
Maliyya Raises USD 1.3 Million in Seed Funding
Maliyya, a fintech company engaged in development of a P2P lending and borrowing platform, has just closed the first seed investment round of USD$1.3 million from Ground1 Ventures, a private investment firm based out of UK.
Targeting to become a primary P2P lending and borrowing platform for the Middle East, North African and Asian Region, Maliyya is working on to roll out its MVP in the coming months. Maliyya has successfully graduated from the first cohort of DIFC Fintech Hive Accelerator (UAE) and now part of the Cloud10 Scalerator Program of C5 Accelerate based in Bahrain.
Maliyya will use this round of funding to accelerate product and technology infrastructure development while expanding its team. Joining the company’s leadership is Rizwan Warsi, a new CTO with more than 30 years of banking technology and operations experience, and delivering enterprise financial industry solutions across in Asia, Africa and Europe. In his new role, Rizwan will be tasked with supporting Maliyya to lead the engineering team and deliver the state of the art P2P platform.
Poland’s PeP buys online payments outfit PayLne
PeP (Polskie ePlatnosci) bought 100% shares of PayLane. PeP is one of the leaders in the Polish payment terminal market, while PayLane specializes in innovative solutions for online payments. Together they intend to expand the range of their services and offer their clients the opportunity to accept payments in the omnichannel model: via payment terminals, mobile, and online.
Polskie ePłatnosci specializes in processing cashless payments and distributing innovative services for business, enabling credit card processing and the implementation of other services via POS terminals. A wide range of services offered by PeP includes, inter alia, settlement of card transactions, cashback, DCC (Dynamic Currency Conversion), top-up pre-paid mobile phones, and support for advanced loyalty programs.
PayLane is an online and mobile payment provider. Since 2005 PayLane has managed to acquire invaluable experience in dozens of world markets and is now able to offer payment services on a global level to Polish e-businesses. Apart from the most popular online payment methods (like credit/debit cards, online bank transfers/orders, e-wallet), PayLane offers a wide variety of solutions which are characteristic for specific countries or regions, allowing transactions carried out in currencies from all around the world.
