Walmart, the American retail giant, is already very active in the industry of financial services for its customers. The company offers an array of products and services, from consumer loans, through rewards programs to protection plans. Now however, Walmart is planning to enter the FinTech industry on a bigger scale by founding a startup in cooperation with a specialist investment company, Ribbit Capital. The newly created enterprise’s goal is to offer new services to Walamart’s retail customers parallelly to what is available right now.

David Bannister, the wholesale banking analyst at Aite, notices that while it is common to offer financial products with retail purchases, such as extended warranties as insurance policies, it is usually done through banks. Will Walmart change the way this business is conducted?
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As we mentioned before (FinTech Wire #3), Visa was planning to acquire Plaid, a PSD2 platform operator for $5.3 billion. Because Plaid is a huge company whose API connects over 11,000 institutions worldwide, the purchase would make Visa a hegemon in the financial industry. Obviously, such a merger looked suspicious to the Department of Justice and, in fact, this regulator decided to stop it from happening. Now, the biggest problem is that Visa spent the whole 2020 securing funds to buy Plaid organizing debt two huge offerings  for $7.27 billion (average rate ~1.9%). Will the payment operator repurchase the shares?

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An official digital currency means a lot of potential benefits to the governments all around the globe and there is no question that they are going to become a standard one day, we only don’t know when it’s going to happen. Public consultations about the European form of digital money started 12 October 2020 and, so far, the European Central Bank has received over 8000 responses regarding this exciting topic. 41% of respondents are interested in the privacy aspect of it, as such a payment method, if not implemented correctly, can allow for increased invigilation. 17% of questions were about cybersecurity and 10% about the pan-european reach. We don’t know much more, because a thorough analysis of the raw data is not finished yet, however the The Eurosystem task force (consisting of ECB and representatives of 19 EU countries) will publish its full report in the spring. Stay tuned!

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Nobody expected that the Chinese government would let this happen, but it did. PayPal is now the first ever payment platform in this country controlled in 100% by foreign capital. The situation is especially interesting, because this particular market is very exclusive and dominated by local payment systems. What is even more interesting, the details of how it happened are confidential and PayPay Holding Inc refuses to comment on how it managed to purchase firstly 70% of shares in GoPay and then the missing 30%. Most importantly, though, buying a small player opened the American corporation a way to compete with Alipay and WeChat pay on Chinese ecommerces. Will it be able to keep their pace? Only time will tell.

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The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a free trade agreement between Asian and Pacific countries, including Australia is a great opportunity for the PRC to become independent from the global SWIFT system, says Liu Xiaochun, from the Shanghai Finance Institute. The economist notices that SWIFT is controlled by foreign countries, so it allows them to impose financial and trade sanctions on China. In this case, it would be best to create an alternative, in cooperation with the RCEP, and give the region more security by giving them the freedom to trade internationally with their own currencies: yuan, yen, Singapore dollar and Hong Kong dollar. Geopolitically, such a system would definitely secure China’s position in the region and in the world, but what about other countries involved in the initiative and the next step to the global yuan? Is Singapore in favor of such a situation? Can Hong-Kong oppose and will it be another step towards losing the last bit of independence? So many questions, so little answers!

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When Goldman Sachs is determined to beat Barclays in a deal worth around $2.5 billion, you can be sure that something big is happening. This time, the bank bought GM’s credit card business and is going to become an issuing bank for the cards operated by Mastercard (for GM) later this year. This way, Goldman Sachs is telling the world that they want to enter the consumer market for real, as it’s the second time they cooperate with a retailer in such a way (the Wall Street giant is also the issuing partner for Apple’s credit card).

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