(The Paypers) NEC has entered the competition to lead Malaysia’s digital identification project, as the government prepares to introduce biometric IDs for its 32 million citizens.
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Today, Visa (NYSE:V) announced a new strategic agreement with Western Union (NYSE:WU), a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement.
Western Union will implement Visa Direct, Visa’s real-time1 push payments platform in an effort to bring speed and transparency to the process of sending money around the world. This collaboration reinforces Visa’s commitment to modernize how payments are made around the world. Once Western Union’s implementation of Visa Direct is live, Western Union will be able to offer customers an expedited remittance service onto cards with more transparency and an enhanced user experience for both senders and receivers. Western Union and Visa share a vision for modern money movement; this expanded service is intended to make cross border payments more reliable and efficient than ever before.
Nearly $80 trillion (US) of money is sent via a wire transfer or bank account globally today, but the process is harder and more complex than it should be. Money can take days to arrive because of outdated, multi-step, costly methods. 85% of all transactions are still in cash, or other physical currency. The digitization and improvement of these solutions are core to both Visa’s and Western Union’s payment modernization strategies.
“Together Visa Direct and Western Union are collaborating with plans to scale real-time cross border payments to businesses and consumers in more than 200 countries and territories in more than 130 currencies,” said Bill Sheley, global head of push payments, Visa. “This new strategic relationship with Western Union combines the industry-leading capabilities of the world’s largest remittance provider with Visa’s global reach, risk management abilities and operating scale, to bring exceptional value propositions and user experiences to senders and receivers around the globe.”
“Western Union has the largest money transfer retail network and this agreement represents a key milestone for our account payout network combining the best of Visa and Western Union’s cross-border capabilities to enable a world-class payments platform,” said Jean Claude Farah, executive vice president, Western Union. “This collaboration enables our customers to have a fast, user-friendly and reliable platform to send funds into billions of eligible accounts across the world.”
In 2018 Western Union completed more than 800 million transactions for consumer and business clients. Their commitment to innovation and convenience has led them to develop and invest in new ways to send money through digital and mobile channels.
Visa is focused on improving and modernizing cross border payments. In addition to this new collaboration, last month, Visa announced the acquisition of control of Earthport, a company that provides cross-border payment services. The acquisition of Earthport is an extension of Visa’s overall cross-border strategy that’s complementary to Visa Direct and our existing partnerships.
(The Paypers) Cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex has revealed that it will block its US-based users from trading in 32 cryptocurrencies, after 21 June 2019.
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(The Paypers) Spain-based biometrics company FacePhi has revealed that Banco General de Panamá will deploy its SelphID facial recognition solution.
(The Paypers) Vietnam`s ecommerce growth is expected to surge to USD 13-15 billion in 2020, according to its Ministry of Industry and Trade.
(The Paypers) An unprecedented move in the Portugal-based primera liga has been revealed, with Benfica announcing that they will be accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum payments.
Worldline, the European market leader in payment and transactional services and Trapeze, a leader in intelligent transport systems, have developed a truly hands-free payment solution that allows passengers using public transport to pay for their ticket by automatically detecting their entire journey using Bluetooth.
The service has been designed to address the issue of increasing numbers of passengers using public transport and harnesses the power of technology to remove the need to ‘physically’ buy a ticket. The service delivers a truly seamless journey across all public transport of any city or region and improves operational efficiency for the transport company.
How does it work?
The system operates by ‘detecting’ passengers via Bluetooth when they enter any public transport vehicle. From these detections, combined with transport network data, check in and check out taps are created in order to obtain the whole passenger journey. Best tariff calculation including fee capping functionalities is applied to finally tigger the related payment using passenger account information. Passengers are able to check their journey and fare at any time via the solution’s mobile app.
The system incorporates a broad range of functionalities including the detection of smartphones in the transit system, general smartphone travel authorisation, journey construction, lowest fare calculation, payment processing and customer relationship management.
The hands-free ticket payment solution is the result of combining automatic passenger presence detection in transit services with core account-based ticketing functionalities. The service has been made possible using Worldline’s cutting-edge Tap 2 Use solution to handle the journey processing and the passenger’s account management and Trapeze’s ComfoAccess facilities to manage Bluetooth-based automated passenger recognition and virtual validations generation. Passengers can now avoid queuing for a ticket or to top-up their card needed to validate their journey.
A seamless journey experience
This new way of paying to travel on public transport ensures the simplification of the passenger’s journey with a truly open loop system that is able to handle multiple identification channels, including contactless EMV, mobile ticketing and automatic detection, on one system.
On 9-12 June 2019, the international public transport community, mobility decision makers and industry suppliers will come together in Stockholm for the UITP Global Public Transport Summit.
Alejandro Rametta, Digital Ticketing Product Manager at Worldline, states: « We all live our lives looking for more and more simplicity which equates to one of the most valuable commodities we have: time. Payment simplification gives us back time and this joint initiative with Trapeze delivers a truly valuable time saving and convenient solution. Public transport passengers are able to travel freely between different methods of transport without the need to queue to buy a ticket for their journey ot topping up a card for a validator device. »
Romeo Oberholze, Ticketing Product Manager at Trapeze, states: “The time where passengers had to worry about the correct ticket for their journey is over. The hands-free ComfoAccess® solution from Trapeze allows to board any vehicle from all the different modes of transportation without any interaction and provides the best possible comfort. ComfoAccess® records and stores all trip segments in a secure manner, recreates the journeys and hands the information over for the subsequent billing process. Through our partner Worldline we are able to offer a fully integrated ticketing solution ensuring, thus, a superior user experience in public transport - from travelling to payment.”