China UnionPay

Alipay’s assembling a portfolio to stitch together a multinational financial services ecosystem. The mobile payments titan’s IPO will provide an enormous war chest to develop new services, turbocharge international expansion, and fund acquisitions, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

Citing the benefit of making purchases from home during the coronavirus pandemic, China's UnionPay International is partnering with digital platform Glovo to enable its cardholders in Europe to participate in on-demand shopping.

Digital technology and the coronavirus recovery will dramatically alter payments in the year ahead, but the scale and benefits of networks will survive, Eric Grover of Intrepid Ventures contends.

Just two months after UnionPay bolstered its support of QR code payments in China through an arrangement with Tencent Holdings Ltd., the company is working with Network International to initiate its first pilot for QR code payments at a merchant location in the UAE.

Competition between hundreds of national and global payment systems forces everybody to continually adapt, up their games, culling weaker and underperforming systems and inviting the search for better mouse traps, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

For decades card networks and issuers outside of China have tried to enter the giant Chinese consumer payments markets, but mostly have run into walls because of shifting regulations.

Finabler’s Xpress Money cross-border transfer service has partnered with Geoswift to enable consumers in global markets to send funds in real time to Chinese bank accounts.

China UnionPay is assembling the relationships it needs to directly issue cards in Europe, but local saturation suggests UnionPay’s best bet is to use European merchant relationships to counter its own domestic rivals in China rather than disrupting Visa and Mastercard.

China's massive card network UnionPay has signed a merchant acquiring agreement with Worldline to bring acceptance of UnionPay cards into 40,000 merchant locations across northwest Europe.

After forming a series of high-profile partnerships with various payments service providers, China's UnionPay International has declared its plan to challenge Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly of the U.K. card industry.