#socialpayments

Bundle comes as a zero-fee solution for Africa’s emerging digital economy. After closing a prior financing round with Binance, the blockchain company behind one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Bundle quickly brought to market its Venmo-like cash and crypto social payments app.

“We believe Africa has several characteristics that make it a prime geographical location for the realization of the full potential of digital currencies, blockchain, and its applications. Currently, only 1.4 million people out of 1.2 billion people in Africa use crypto today. This is a worthwhile mission because making the blockchain ecosystem more accessible unlocks economic opportunity on and for the continent,” said Bundle Chief Technical Officer, Taiwo Orilogbon.

Facebook thinks making payments should be as easy as sending a photo. But rolling out that service for more than a billion users isn’t something the social network’s executives think it can do on its own.

“We don’t believe we are a payments company—we don’t believe we have the skills to be a payments company,” Paulette Rowe, Facebook’s global head of payment and financial services partnerships, said today at the Money 20/20 Europe conference in Amsterdam. “What we do want to do is to partner.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the company’s ambitions to ramp up its payment offerings. A successful payments business, after all, could help Facebook diversify away from its dependence on advertising based on collecting personal data. The company recently launched a checkout service on Instagram so users can pay for things without leaving the app. Facebook also has 1 billion people using a beta version of WhatsApp payments in India, and it recently picked London as a hub for its drive to expand WhatsApp payments globally.

Alipay, the payment affiliate of Alibaba, is reportedly reaping the rewards of its partnership with Motion Pay Technology, the payment company in Canada.

According to a report in Mobile Payments Today, as a result of the deal, Motion Pay Technology enables Alipay as an in-store payment method for a large number of merchants across the country. According to comments from Alipay, the Chinese digital payment service is now accepted in all of the major Canadian cities and across various retail categories, including restaurants, hospitality, retail and luxury verticals.

“We are thrilled with the success of our partnership with Motion Pay to date, which has played an instrumental role in our growth across Canada this past year,” Souheil Badran, president of Alipay, Americas, said in a press release. “As our first Canadian partner, Motion Pay has helped us to reach critical mass in acceptance points across Canada. We look forward to continuing our relationship, and enabling even more Canadian brands and retailers to connect with the growing number of Chinese consumers seeking items they can’t find at home, and simplifying payments by offering Alipay’s familiar method.”

With Chinese consumers spending money traveling around the world, Alipay has been in expansion mode, aiming to follow the customers wherever they shop. To achieve that, it has been forging partnerships with merchants and vendors around the globe.

In one high-profile partnership, the company recently announced that more than 1,000 Starbucks locations across South Korea will now accept Alipay. With the deal, Alipay becomes the first third-party mobile payment method available in Starbucks locations throughout South Korea.

Ripple — the blockchain company whose technology powers the cryptocurrency XRP — has created a new payment app in which transactions are settled instantly.

According to news from CNBC, the new app was created with a group of 61 banks in Japan. Dubbed Money Tap, the mobile app will launch in the fall and will be initially offered through SBI Net Sumishin Bank, Suruga Bank and Resona Bank, three of the consortium partners. It will then be rolled out to the remainder of the Japanese banks that are part of the alliance.

Ripple said the new app will make it easier for banks to settle payment transactions 24/7. In order to access the new offering, consumers must have a bank account, phone number or a QR barcode.

“Together with the trust, reliability and reach of the bank consortium, we can remove friction from payments and create a faster, safer and more efficient domestic payments experience for our customers,” Takashi Okita, CEO of SBI Ripple Asia, said in a statement to CNBC.

Messaging and payments continue to converge in India after Google added chat features to its Tez payment app in India.

The move follows the introduction of peer-to-peer payments inside WhatsApp in India, its largest country worldwide with over 200 million users, last month and it now allows users of Tez to communicate directly with contacts via the app. Google told Gadgets 365 that the feature is rolling out among users so not all of them may have it yet.

Google launched Tez last year and it claims to have more than 15 million registered users. The app started out as a plain peer-to-peer transfer service, but it recently added the (useful) capability of paying bills such as gas and water and TV/internet services.

Paytm, India’s leading mobile wallet service, has also bridged the messaging-payment gap, too. It launched messaging capabilities last year, and it also has plans to introduce other services including games.

Google has long tried to succeed in the messaging space with a bunch of different services, the most notable being Hangouts, launched for consumers, but none ever reached anything like the critical mass of WhatsApp.

The leader in mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, PayPal's (NASDAQ:PYPL) subsidiary Venmo theoretically has the most to lose from Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) entry into the P2P market. The Mac maker formally announced Apple Pay Cash, its own P2P service integrated directly into iMessage, over the summer, and Apple Pay Cash finally launched this week alongside iOS 11.2. Apple Pay Cash processes through a debit card in order to minimize the transaction fees that Apple absorbs, and it represents a seamless way to send money to friends and family (provided they have an Apple device running the latest software, of course).

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman has already said he's not too worried about Apple Pay Cash, and now a Street analyst is echoing that sentiment.

Credit Suisse put out a research note earlier this week (via Business Insider) that argues that Venmo will be able to sustain its lead thanks to its first-mover advantage. In fact, the analyst views Apple's entry as "validation of the social payments model" that Venmo created, and that broader trend is good news for many internet companies that continue to integrate more payment methods. "We do not see these as meaningful threats to PayPal (which has first-mover advantage)," analyst Paul Condra wrote, according to the report.

"There's definitely a trend towards mobile payments moving into social media," says Charlotte Crosswell, chief executive of Innovate Finance, an organisation that represents the UK's global financial technology community.

Big players such as Facebook and Google are already enabling payments through their platforms, she says.

"The success of companies such as Paypal's Venmo app in the US, which allows users to share their mobile payment messages on social feeds, has spurred on incumbents to create similar offerings such as the Zelle app."

Facebook is now pushing its Messenger payments in Britain

Venmo allows payments to be made within mobile apps, but crucially, allows users to follow each other's accounts and add comments.

"It wasn't just another payment app when it launched, it socialised payments so you could pay a friend for your share of dinner and add a comment that your contact could see, such as 'great restaurant'," explains Tony Smith, head of financial services research at Ipsos.

Facebook Inc. is enabling people outside the U.S. to send money to each other via its Messenger texting app for the first time.

The social network said Monday that Messenger users in the U.K. will be able to send money to each other when the feature rolls out in the next few weeks. People will need to sign up with their debit cards to send or receive money.

“In the U.S. most people use payments in Messenger to send less than $50 at a time,” David Marcus, head of Messenger, said in a statement, adding that the feature is most commonly used during social occasions.

Facebook began letting its users in the U.S. send cash to each other in 2015 but doesn’t charge for its use. The move is part of an increasing trend by tech giants to muscle in on the global payments industry.

Apple Inc.’s forthcoming Apple Pay Cash will let the company’s device owners send money to each other through its iMessage service. Square Inc. has a similar product called Square Cash, and PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo has been a popular choice for younger users in particular.