Israel

The Trump administration is accelerating its restrictions on immigration, including a ban on skilled workers that will make it harder for fintechs to hire people from outside the U.S.

Mastercard is adding to its global network of innovation labs by partnering with Enel X, a mobility and smart-city startup, to open a center in the Israeli fintech hub of Be'er Sheva.

Getting companies to share fraud fighting intel is a tough game, but Forter has played it well enough to draw a fresh round of funding to boost the Israeli fintech's profile in the U.S.

New York- and Tel Aviv-based Behalf provides point-of-sale financing for SMEs making e-commerce purchases from large merchants. Visa will offer Behalf’s SME clients reusable, tokenized Visa virtual cards which give businesses instant loans for their purchases and flexible repayment schedules.

The Bank of Lithuania has been courting fintechs which need an EU payments or banking license to operate in Europe. In July 2018, it introduced an e-licensing tool that makes it cheaper and quicker to submit the information necessary to obtain an operating licence.

Bancor, an Israeli startup that facilitates trading in digital tokens, said a criminal made off with a $13.5 million cache, mostly comprised of Ether.

As consumers spend more time interacting over social media and messaging platforms, those providers are making sure that they can also make payments related to any topic of conversation. But the arrival of Apple Pay Cash is complicating the market.

Verifone will provide its full-scale payments-as-a-service platform to the Shufersal supermarket chain in Israel, allowing the stores to offer an omnichannel payment experience to customers.

Bank Hapoalim Ltd.’s credit-card unit may be valued at about $1 billion as the lender prepares to divest the business to comply with new Israeli regulations, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

As global e-commerce proliferates, payment platforms are stepping up to cater to U.S. merchants eager to sell their wares in emerging markets. But there can be as many risks as there are opportunities when entering a new market.