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Facebook will scrap Messenger payments in the UK and France
Facebook will discontinue peer-to-peer Messenger payments in France and the UK on June 15th, the company told Engadget. "After evaluating how we give people the best experiences in Messenger, we made the decision to focus our efforts on experiences that people find most useful," Facebook said, adding that active users will be notified ahead of the changes.
Apple Pay Cash nears its first international expansion
Apple Pay Cash may not be limited to Americans for much longer. Users in Brazil, Ireland and Spain have all reported seeing the peer-to-peer payment service show up in iOS' Messages app, suggesting that launches in their countries (and potentially more) are just around the bend. Apple hasn't officially announced anything yet, but it's hard to imagine the company asking people to configure the feature and letting it sit unused for more than a short while.
Facebook Messenger's money transfer tool is heading to the UK
Back in 2015, Facebook introduced the ability to send money to friends through Messenger and now it has brought that capability to UK users. It's the first time Facebook has launched the feature outside of the US.
PayPal 'instantly' transfers money to your bank account
PayPal can be frustrating if you want to put funds in your bank account. It can take a day or more for transfers to go through, and that's a problem when rival services like Zelle can promise speedier access to your money without needing a separate app. To that end, PayPal is rolling out an instant transfer option in the US. So long as you're willing to accept a 25-cent transaction fee, your funds will hit your bank account within a few minutes, and no more than 30 minutes in the worst cases. If you withdraw money from PayPal before a shopping trip, it should be ready to use by the time you get to the store.
Walmart's new app helps you skip store lines
Walmart doesn't just want its mobile app to speed up your checkout -- now, it might help you avoid lines altogether for certain services. An upgrade to the app has introduced "express lane" services for both prescription pickups and money transfers. Once you've filled in a medicine or money transfer order on your phone, you just have to waltz up to the appropriate store counter, scan a QR code with the app and complete your business.
Hackers tried and failed to steal a billion dollars from bank
Hackers stole $80 million from a bank, but it could have been a lot worse if they had just Googled the name of a company, according to Reuters. Thieves got inside servers of the Bangladesh Bank, stealing the credentials used to make online transfers. They then bombarded the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with up to 13 money transfer requests to organizations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The Fed allowed four to go through totaling $81 million, but the next one was flagged by a routing bank in Germany because the hackers misspelled "foundation" as "fandation."
PayPal to buy money-transfer startup Xoom for $890 million
Wiring money home (especially as cash) can be an awkward, expensive and time-consuming ordeal -- but it's about to get a whole lot easier. PayPal announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring San Francisco-based digital money transfer startup Xoom (no, not the tablet maker) to make "international remittances simpler, safer and more affordable," according to the company's blog. Xoom transferred more than $7 billion for its 1.3 million customers over the 12 months preceding last April, primarily on mobile devices between family and friends. PayPal (which has up to now focused on business payments) hopes to leverage this platform in its planned expansion into markets like Mexico, India, the Philippines, China and Brazil. The acquisition is expected to be complete by the end of the year, assuming it passes muster with regulators and Xoom's investors.
BBM Money to launch in Indonesia, allows peer-to-peer fund transfers
RIM might be struggling for market share here in the US, but the BlackBerry name still enjoys quite a bit of popularity elsewhere in the world. Take Indonesia for example, where the company will launch BBM Money, a transactional service that'll allow money transfers between BlackBerry owners. Apparently BBM is already a popular way to set up peer-to-peer transactions in the Southeast Asian country, so the service essentially closes the loop. With Android usage on the rise over there -- around 52 percent market share according to a recent IDC report -- RIM is likely trying anything it can to retain its stronghold. We're not sure when exactly BBM Money will go live, though RIM has said it's to come "shortly," perhaps along with the launch of BlackBerry 10 in 2013.
Bump Pay lets you tap a friend for cash
Taking cues from an ING Direct app that used its API, Bump Technologies has developed its own version of the mobile payments software, enabling phone-to-phone "Bump" transactions using PayPal. Yes, PayPal. That minor processing detail aside, the service appears to offer a fun solution for simplifying the fairly painful process of paying the check at group meals, or splitting a tank of gas with a friend. Both you and your bud need to have the app installed before you can beam that green, and there's no option to send payments remotely, though you could always use plain ole vanilla PayPal for that. The app is free, and if you have a checking account linked you won't have to deal with any fees. Bump Pay is iOS only "at launch" (read: it could be making its way to Android as well), so for now you'll need to bump the App Store to get folks paid.
PayPal's Digital Wallet lets you decide how you empty yours (video)
PayPal has been helping us pay for those impulse purchases for a long time, but now its forthcoming Digital Wallet could see it popping up on our bank statements a whole lot more. Speaking with eBay Ink, PayPal's Sam Shrauger gave a quick demo of some of the new features. As well as the regular payment handling, you'll be able to register gift vouchers, coupons, loyalty points and store credit cards all under one account. This sounds tidy, but more interesting is the ability to change how you pay for something (say, from credit to debit card) up to seven days after the fact. If you want to keep those big purchases on the Amex, that's no problem either, with configurable rules letting you assign different cards to different spending situations, including setting your own custom payment plans. It's not all about buying either, with savings also getting the digital treatment, that's if you haven't doled it all out on gadget rarities. The service is expected to land in May, in the meantime see the new features via the videos after the break.
ING Direct's iOS app adds 'bump' money transfer feature for well-heeled posses
Look, violence doesn't solve everything, but ING Direct reckons a gentle fist bump can help fix financial quarrels between you and your buddies. Recently added to the bank's iOS app is a feature that makes use of Bump Technologies' API, with which a physical bump between two active devices instantly triggers a money transfer, thus saving the sender from having to put in account details. 'Course, this is only usable for transactions within ING for the time being, so you'll have to stick to other methods for some quick and dirty mobile payments to the outside world.
Discover cardholders can send money to anyone with a cell phone, email address
With NFC payment systems just starting to roll out in the US, it'll be awhile yet before you can cut up those credit cards for good. But in the present, at least, you can use your handset to make sure you don't get stuck with a $100 bar tab... again. Discover just announced that it will let its cardholders send money to people in 60 countries -- so long as they have either a cell phone number or email address. As AllThingsD notes, Visa and American Express have hatched similar plans, though Discover is the first of the bunch to partner with PayPal. While people sending money don't need PayPal accounts, people receiving moola do -- or, at least, they must be willing to create one. For senders the service is free and, in fact, they get 0.25 percent cash back for the first $3,000 exchanged. As for Discover, a smaller player than Visa and MasterCard, it hopes some of PayPal's 230 million customers will sign up for a shiny new credit card while they're at it.
Nokia Money wants some of what PayPal's having
A healthy percentage of Nokia's revenue comes from emerging markets, and the company goes to great lengths to fill out the very bottom rungs of its lineup with devices to satisfy seemingly every need of every demographic -- built-in flashlights, segmented contact lists for phones shared among family members, the list goes on -- and now the company's tackling another need by offering rudimentary banking and money transfer services by way of the handset. Noting that of the four billion cellphones in the world there are only 1.6 billion bank accounts, Nokia's so-called Nokia Money service will bring electronic money management to some areas of the world for the first time -- a customer need only know the phone number of the intended recipient to send a payment. Powered by mobile money transfer specialist Obopay, Nokia Money's going to be shown at Nokia World next week on its way to a rollout in select markets early next year.
Visa gunning for your phone, announces Nokia and Android plans
Neither mobile banking apps nor mobile payment technologies are anything new, but the depth of Visa's newfound commitment to anything and everything mobile here is pretty unique. The company has announced a slew of initiatives to make it as frighteningly easy as possible for cardholders to do cool things with their accounts right from their phones starting with the launch of the Nokia 6212 Classic next month, which will serve up NFC-based contactless payments, cardholder-to-cardholder transfers, and realtime account alerts (subject to issuing bank availability). Meanwhile, they've wasted no time jumping on the Android bandwagon, revealing that they've hooked up with Chase to offer an Android app that delivers notifications, merchant "offers," and a location-based search of nearby retailers that accept Visa cards (which is pretty much all of them in our experience). If the Chase trial pans out, Visa plans to shop the Android app around to other issuing banks. Finally, there's also a new web-based mobile money transfer pilot going down that's scheduled to kick off around the end of the year involving several banks and "as many as" 6,000 cardholders; what are the odds that those 6,000 are going to be transferring much money among each other, though?[Via CNET]Read - Nokia partnershipRead - Android plansRead - Mobile money transfer
Western Union hopes to enable mobile money transfers, scammers rejoice
Just when you thought those Nigerian scammers were simply running out of avenues to coerce you into cashing some counterfeit check for $4.98 billion, along comes this. Western Union is apparently buddying up with 35 or so cellphone operators to "develop a system that would allow consumers to transfer money from country to country via their mobile phones." Reportedly, the outfit has successfully tested the service in a number of US cities, and if everything goes as planned, it could launch in Q2 of 2008. Notably, it still sounds like an actual human will be a part of the process, as the system will purportedly "connect the user to a company operator to complete the transaction." Quite frankly, we appreciate the convenience of such a service, but don't you go falling for any sappy stories of long-lost cousins needing your help to funnel in millions as you ride to work, alright?
