UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, JCB, American Express and Diners Club brand credit, debit and prepaid cards issued in the Asia–Pacific region accounted for $21.060 trillion in purchase volume for goods and services in 2021, up 10.7% on a local currency basis from 2020.
Real-world applications that leverage the great power of quantum computing technology are not years away from making a commercial impact as many IT department heads believe. Financial institutions including Bank of Canada, BBVA and CaixaBank are already working with the technology, which uses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that are too complex for legacy, silicon-based “classical” computers.
Azure, the cloud computing service of Microsoft, will host digital services for Nexi, a top European provider of merchant acquiring, card account processing, digital banking and corporate payment services.
Issuers from 49 countries are ranked on pages 8 and 9. These are the 50 largest issuers of credit, debit and prepaid general purpose and domestic-market-only cards in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region. The top 50 combined issued 215.4 million consumer and commercial cards.
Visa and Mastercard halted payments to the Pornhub platform in 2020 after The New York Times published an opinion piece that cited the Luxembourg-based company’s tolerance of exploited minors on its website.
Purchase transactions worldwide for goods and services initiated by credit, debit and prepaid cards carrying brands of the global networks—Visa, UnionPay, Mastercard, American Express, JCB and Diners Club/Discover—amounted to a combined 581.22 billion in 2021, an increase of 24.5% over 2020.
The benefit to merchants of account-to-account (A2A) payments as an alternative to accepting debit cards is largely due to lower cost. A consumer protection regulation that covers most countries in Europe requires banks to provide access to bank account information for free.
Processor SumUp, which handles transactions from four million small merchants in 35 countries, has raised $602 million (€590 million) last month in an approximately 50%-50% combination of debt financing and equity funding. The equity round was SumUp’s first in five years. The company’s valuation was placed at $8.16 billion (€8.00 billion).
Fighting fraud is expensive for online merchants. At merchants that sell physical goods, the combined cost of packaging and shipping, implementing fraud fighting technology, the internal staff needed to oversee questionable transactions as well as chargeback management and resolution can more than double the monetary value of the goods lost to criminals.
Card account processing and management services are available in Europe and the Middle East from Enfuce. The company opened for business in 2017 and handles credit, debit and prepaid issuing, processing, BIN sponsorship and fraud and dispute management in-house.
