Subscription management platform provider Zuora is partnering with payments infrastructure player Stripe this week.

Through the partnership, Zuora has integrated Stripe into its subscription offerings to enable its 1,000 clients to enhance their payment capabilities. Zuora customers can now access Stripe’s payment tools from the Zuora platform.

“Winning subscription companies want to use the best technologies to build a competitive advantage,” said Zuora Chief Product Officer Chris Battles. “We’re thrilled to work with Stripe in an ecosystem of new world partners that helps to optimize and automate processes throughout our customers’ journey in the Subscription Economy.”

Some of the advanced capabilities include:

• Integrated payment processing capabilities into the Zuora platform, including fraud detection, AI-enhanced payment retries, and payment processing capabilities.
• Increased payments flexibility so subscribers can pay when, where, and how they choose across a range of subscription options.
• A modern ecosystem that can scale to meet clients’ global growth.

Zuora has more than 1,000 clients, including Box, Ford, Penske Media Corporation, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Xplornet, and Zoom. The company’s platform helps firms manage recurring subscription business models and serves as a hub to automate the entire subscription order-to-revenue process across billing and revenue recognition. Zuora was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in California.

Valued at $36 billion, Stripe helps businesses of all sizes with finance and treasury management functions.

“Stripe’s mission is to grow the GDP of the internet, and this partnership with Zuora extends that goal by giving Zuora users access to the full capabilities of Stripe payments,” said Stripe’s Chief Business Officer Billy Alvarado. “With the internet powering a rapidly growing portion of the global economy, it’s never been more important to provide subscription businesses with the economic infrastructure they need.”

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PhonePe is selling a $700 million stake in its company to existing investors, including Walmart, which led the financing round. The digital wallet and online payments company will use the funding to distance itself from Flipkart, which Walmart purchased in 2018. As part of the deal, Flipkart’s ownership of PhonePe will drop from 100% to 87%, according to TechCrunch.

India-based PhonePe anticipates that the $700 million in capital– along with independence from parent company Flipkart, which operates an ecommerce division– will help boost its growth in the ever-growing digital payments arena.

Further cementing PhonePe’s independence, the company has appointed its own board of directors, including PhonePe Founder and CEO Sameer Nigam and former Flipkart executive Binny Bansal.

“We are really excited to have access to dedicated long-term capital to further our ambitions in the financial services distribution sector as well as creating large innovative growth platforms for India’s micro, small, and medium enterprises,” said Nigam.

Founded in 2015, PhonePe is estimated to be worth around $5.5 billion. The company anticipates it will be profitable by 2022 and plans to go public in 2023. PhonePe currently has 100 million active users and recorded almost one billion transactions on its platform in October.

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Lloyds Banking Group is making instant, cross-border payments possible, thanks to a partnership with global secure financial messaging services provider SWIFT.

The U.K.-based bank announced it is the first bank to go live with SWIFT’s gpi Instant Connection, a new service that helps consumers and businesses send money in seconds across the globe.

gpi, which stands for Global Payments Initiative, was launched in 2017 to facilitate international payments. Since then, SWIFT has amassed more than 4,000 financial institution clients who collectively use gpi to send more than $300 billion each day in more than 150 currencies.

“At Lloyds Bank we strive to continually evolve and create innovative solutions for our clients,” said Ed Thurman, Managing Director and Head of Global Transaction Banking at Lloyds Banking Group. “The gpi Instant service is set to be a game changer in cross-border payments and we are very excited to be the first bank globally to offer the service here into the U.K.”

The new service leverages SWIFT gpi, SWIFT’s high-speed cross-border rails, and connects with a country’s own real-time infrastructure. In Lloyds’ case, SWIFT gpi is connecting with the U.K.’s Faster Payments, the region’s own real-time payments initiative.

“We developed gpi Instant with our community through responsible innovation and equal emphasis on four core needs — speed, security, transparency and compliance,” said David Watson, Chief Strategy Officer at SWIFT. “We look forward to continuing our work with market infrastructures and financial institutions to bring the benefits of seamless cross-border payments to customers across the globe.”

The launch with Lloyds comes after SWIFT tested out the service earlier this year in a pilot with Lloyds, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, DBS, Wells Fargo, and BBVA. The real-time payments capabilities are part of SWIFT’s new strategy to retool cross-border infrastructure to facilitate instant and frictionless transactions.

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Taking the opportunity to seize a fresh start that comes with a new year, Facebook’s Libra Association has rebranded to Diem Association.

The group chose the name Diem, which is Latin for “day” to signal a new day for the association. The rebrand will not change the mission of the organization, which is to build a safe, secure, and compliant payment system. The move will, however, serve as a way of “reinforcing its organizational independence.”

“The Diem project will provide a simple platform for fintech innovation to thrive and enable consumers and businesses to conduct instantaneous, low-cost, highly secure transactions,” said the Diem Association’s CEO Stuart Levey. “We are committed to doing so in a way that promotes financial inclusion – expanding access to those who need it most, and simultaneously protecting the integrity of the financial system by deterring and detecting illicit conduct. We are excited to introduce Diem – a new name that signals the project’s growing maturity and independence.”

As Levey suggests, the new name serves as a way for Diem to distance itself from Facebook, which initiated the association in June of 2018. This isn’t the first time the group has attempted to disassociate itself with Facebook. In May, the association changed the name of the Diem digital wallet from Calibra to Novi.

In addition to the rebrand, the Diem Association and its subsidiary that serves as the regulated payment system operator, Diem Networks, is reinforcing its ranks. The group has appointed Dahlia Malkhi as the Association’s Chief Technology Officer, Christy Clark as Chief of Staff, Steve Bunnell as Chief Legal Officer, and Kiran Raj as Executive Vice President for Growth and Innovation and Deputy General Counsel.

The news of the new hires comes on the heels of the company’s appointment of James Emmett as Managing Director, Sterling Daines as Chief Compliance Officer, Ian Jenkins as Chief Financial and Risk Officer, and Saumya Bhavsar as General Counsel.

Regardless of today’s seemingly upbeat news, Diem is still currently in limbo. The association is still waiting on regulatory approval, including a payment systems license for the operational subsidiary of the Association from the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA).

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