• Alibaba and Honda have signed an agreement to offer online payments to drivers for fuel, parking and other services in China
  • Alipay has released research showing that 82% of the transactions on its platform in 2017 were made through mobile devices. There were 520m Alipay users in China in 2017, around 37% of the country’s population
  • Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has flagged up the cryptocurrency boom as one of his top challenges for the year ahead
  • Funding Circle has announced a new partnership with INTRUST Bank, a regional bank headquartered in Kansas. The partnership will be rolled out in various stages with the initial phase consisting of INTRUST funding US small business loans originated through Funding Circle
  • Visa has terminated WaveCrest’s membership and ordered it to close all of its pre-paid cryptocurrency cards. Cards including BitPay, Cryptopay and Bitwala have suspended their cards and are working to return funds to users. Visa said the decision to terminate WaveCrest’s membership was due to ‘continued non-compliance with our operating rules’
  • Sky Betting and Gaming has partnered with Barclays to offer customers a service that will pay out money to their debit cards in real time. The new payment system has been developed in association with Vocalink and aims to provide gamblers with the ‘real time’ payment of their winnings compared to waiting up to five days
  • Ant Financial Services Group has become a new technical associate of international secure-payments consortium EMVCo, along with seven other organisations
  • JCB International has signed an agreement with iZettle to release an awareness campaign on JCB card acceptance across Europe. As part of the campaign, which will end in May 2018, London’s black cabs will support JCB and iZettle logos to raise awareness and all London taxis with iZettle payment devices will accept JCB Cards