2024: Top five fintech partnership stories of the year
Capping off 2024, FinTech Futures takes a look back at some of the year’s top partnerships.
Working together, individual organisations and firms can achieve more. This year has seen the formation of a number of partnerships as companies look to tackle problems, innovate and provide value for consumers across the world.
As we approach the end of another year, here’s a look back at five of the top partnership stories across 2024.
NPCI teams up with Google Pay to expand UPI beyond India
NPCI partners Google Pay for UPI expansion
Google Pay India has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Payments Corporation of India’s (NPCI) international payments subsidiary to expand the reach of the country’s United Payments Interface (UPI).
The main goals of this expansion are to allow travellers to use UPI for payments abroad, create similar digital payment systems in other countries, and make cross-border money transfers easier between countries using the same baseline UPI infrastructure.
These goals aimed at accelerating UPI acceptance on a global level are boosted by the availability of the system on UPI-powered apps like Google Pay.
With this, Indian consumers will be better connected with foreign merchants and will no longer have to rely on foreign currency, forex cards or conventional money transfer channels when attempting to make digital payments.
EPAA forms working group with IBM, HSBC, AP+, and PayPal to explore quantum-safe cryptography
The Emerging Payments Association Asia (EPAA) has announced the formation of a new working group on quantum-safe cryptography (WG-QSC) with the aim to “encourage the adoption of quantum-safe cryptography in the banking industry”.
With industry heavyweights HSBC, AP+, PayPal and IBM as founding members, the WG-QSC’s remit will include studying policy, regulation, and operator business processes to develop best practices for the implementation of quantum-safe cryptography.
The group says that it aims “to enhance the protection of payment rails and processes in anticipation of advanced quantum computing that will be able to compromise existing cryptography”.
This enhancement includes working to “help define requirements, identify dependencies, use cases, and create a roadmap to implement post-quantum networking”.
BIS and Bank of England team up to evaluate synchronised settlement in FX transactions
BIS and Bank of England unite to launch Project Meridian FX
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England have partnered to launch Project Meridian FX, an investigation examining synchronised settlement in foreign exchange (FX) transactions.
The project will connect Meridian FX’s synchronisation operator (SO) with three solutions under the Eurosystem’s broader exploratory work on wholesale settlement: the DL3S DLT Interoperability Solution by the Banque de France; the Trigger Solution by Deutsche Bundesbank; and the TIPS Hash-Link by Banca d’Italia.
This connection seeks to assess the “usability” of the SO across various asset types and technologies, while pinpointing additional integrateable features that “could help reduce the liquidity needs of participants”.
By concentrating on FX transactions, the project participants believe Meridian FX has the potential to address long-standing challenges in settling FX trades, including reducing the “costs, risks, and time” associated with cross-border transactions.
Banque de France partners HKMA to explore interoperability between wholesale CBDC infrastructures
The Banque de France (BDF) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) to explore how their differing infrastructures can support cross-border settlement using wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs), building on their mutual participation in the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Eurosystem CBDC exploratory project.
Engaging the BDF’s distributed ledger for securities settlement system, DL3S, with the HKMA’s Ensemble Sandbox, the study will explore the optimisation of settlement efficiency by strengthening the compatibility of financial market infrastructures between different jurisdictions.
Denis Beau, first deputy governor of the BDF, explains that the collaboration with the regulator will seek to test “different use cases for payment versus payment (PvP) between the tokenised form of the Hong Kong dollar and the Euro” under the “clear objective to improve cross-border payments”.
Barclays signs agreement to become exclusive issuer of GM credit card programme
Barclays signs credit card partnership agreement with GM
Barclays US Consumer Bank has signed a long-term credit card partnership agreement with General Motors (GM), through which it will become “the exclusive issuer of the GM Rewards Mastercard and the GM Business Mastercard in the United States starting next summer”.
GM and Barclays say the bank will be “acquiring the card programme’s receivables from the current issuer next year”, with the deal serving to boost the bank’s credit card portfolio in the US as it looks to “build upon its growth strategy announced last February”.
The bank will replace Goldman Sachs as the issuer of the US automotive giant’s credit card programme. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
Goldman Sachs had previously beaten a rival offer from Barclays to acquire GM’s credit card business from previous issuer Capital One back in 2020 in a deal worth a reported $2.5 billion.
