UPI, built by a coalition of Indian banks, has become the most popular way Indians transact online, processing over 10 billion transactions monthly.
In February, a parliamentary panel in India urged the government to support the growth of domestic fintech players that can offer alternatives to the Walmart-backed PhonePe and Google Pay apps.
The NPCI has long advocated for limiting the market share of individual companies participating in the UPI ecosystem to 30%.
The RBI is also weighing an incentive plan to create a more favorable competitive field for emerging UPI players, another person familiar with the matter said.
Indian daily Economic Times separately reported Wednesday that the NPCI is encouraging fintech companies to offer incentives to their users, promoting the use of their respective apps for making UPI transactions.
In one of the latest developments, Danish company Flatpay, which builds payment solutions for small and medium physical merchants like shops, restaurants and salons, has raised €45 million ($47 million) led by Dawn Capital.
Founded in 2022, Flatpay currently has just 7,000 customers across its current footprint of Denmark, Finland and Germany.
Perhaps most interestingly, on the sales side, despite its focus on streamlined technology, Flatpay only sells via live sales visits.
No online sales (although there are specialists who will help arrange those in-person sales visits and handle support), no virtual visits, and no plans to introduce either.
And the only way they could understand the products really well was by the company paring down the products themselves.
That’s a different strategy from just about every other market, where Google has been merging Wallet and Pay experiences together under a single Wallet app.
We’re continuing to invest in the Google Pay app to give people easy, secure access to digital payments,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.
Then, it tried to replace the Wallet and its Android Pay app with Google Pay.
In 2022, Google relaunched the Wallet app as its digital wallet platform for Android, Wear OS and Fitbit OS.
However, in February this year, the search giant announced it would replace Google Pay with the Wallet app in the U.S.
Faraday Future has avoided getting evicted from its Los Angeles headquarters — for the time being.
The resolution comes as Faraday Future is once again strapped for cash.
There, BXP Realty claimed that Faraday Future stopped making lease payments in December and that it owed $127,311.16.
Faraday Future does not appear to have formally responded to the lawsuit, and in early March, a default order was entered.
It’s unclear if Faraday Future still occupies the space.
Fisker temporarily lost track of millions of dollars in customer payments as it scaled up deliveries, leading to an internal audit that started in December and took months to complete, TechCrunch has learned.
The EV startup was ultimately able to track down a majority of those payments or request new ones from customers whose payment methods had expired.
Red flags raisedFisker has warned investors since last year about problems with its internal accounting practices.
Fisker’s poor internal procedures have created problems beyond keeping track of payments.
Fisker hired contractors in February to help resolve the title and registration problems, but the backlog was immense, according to the people.
The one time that Europe is explicitly mentioned, however, is in relation to Apple’s grip on digital wallets, NFC and mobile payment technology within its iOS ecosystem.
For context, the EU filed charges against Apple in May 2022, concluding that Apple “abused a dominant position” around mobile wallets by preventing rival services from accessing the iPhone’s contactless NFC payment functionality.
For example, Apple allows merchants to use the iPhone’s NFC antenna to accept tap-to-pay payments from consumers.
Then there is cross-platform smartwatch compatibility, which the DOJ says Apple impedes by restricting certain features from third-party smartwatch makers.
However, NFC, digital wallets, and mobile payments are where they seem to be most neatly aligned on.
Nala set out to offer remittance services, it’s building a B2B payment platform too It says, this is to guarantee reliability to its app users and businesses making payments into and out of AficaPayments company Nala pivoted to offer remittance service in 2021, tapping the growing money transfer market in Africa, and demand for reliable and affordable services.
For markets like Kenya, they have integrated with mobile money service M-Pesa enabling users living in the diaspora to pay local bills directly.
However, building the service on the payment rails of other providers meant that the fintech could not guarantee dependability.
This drove the decision to develop its own platform that directly integrates with banks and mobile money providers.
The remittance business growth coincides with reports that remittance flows to sub-Saharan Africa will continue on a growth trajectory.
The third-party application provider license will enable Paytm to offer payments through the UPI network even as Paytm’s parent firm One97 Communications’ banking unit — Payment Payments Bank — is scheduled to cease operations on Friday.
The Reserve Bank of India ordered Paytm in late January to cease operations at Paytm Payments Bank, an affiliate of the financial services firm that processed majority of its transactions.
The move created shockwaves through the industry, and also meant that Paytm needed to secure the third-party application provider license to continue many of the Paytm app’s operations.
Axis, HDFC, State Bank of India and Yes Bank will serve as payment system provider to the Paytm app, NPCI said Thursday.
The RBI had advised NPCI to swiftly issue the third-party application provider license, or TPAP, to Paytm to help mitigate disruptions for its customers.
A couple of years ago, payments orchestration was a foreign term to many large companies Juan Pablo Ortega would speak to.
Today, Yuno has facilitated transactions in over 40 countries worldwide and is working with enterprise clients like McDonald’s, Rappi, Avianca and inDrive.
The global payments orchestration market is forecasted to reach nearly $7 billion in value by 2032.
Many of Yuno’s competitors focus on solving payment orchestration for small and medium businesses, and not many were building the infrastructure for large enterprises, Ortega says.
That new round of capital gives Yuno a valuation of $150 million, Ortega said.
As cybercriminals continue to reap the financial rewards of their attacks, talk of a federal ban on ransom payments is getting louder.
Since then, just as talk of a potential ransom payment ban has gotten louder, so has the ransomware activity.
Is a ban on ransom payments the solution?
For a ban on ransom payments to be successful, international and universal regulation would need to be implemented — which, given varying international standards around ransom payments, would be almost impossible to enforce.
Given the brazen nature of these attackers, it’s unlikely that they would be deterred by a ban on ransom payments.
