Ant Financial, Coinbase, Lydia, Visa in payments this week

Ant Financial is planning to raise around $5bn in a funding round expected to value the Alibaba payments affiliate at more than $100bn
Coinbase, which has blamed recent changes to the coding of cryptocurrency purchases for a recent spate of erroneous charges against customer accounts, has issued a joint statement with Visa on the issue
Lydia, a French mobile payments start-up currently processing around 1m transactions per month, has raised €13m in a funding round led by CNP Assurances. The company recently launched in the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal and plans to expand further, with Germany and Austria the next targets
Visa has announced that it has not modified any policies related to the purchasing of Bitcoin and still allows cardholders to make cryptocurrency purchases with ‘credit, debit, and certain prepaid Visa products’. The announcement follows reports that Visa and Mastercard had changed how cryptocurrency transactions were coded to be considered cash advances. Separately, Mastercard has said it has clarified the right category for purchases with acquirers.