UnionPay International announced on July 23 that the number of overseas educational institutions, including high schools, colleges and universities accepting UnionPay cards for tuition payment has risen to more than 1,200. The service is available in countries and regions for studying abroad such as the US, Canada, Australia, England, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Taiwan and covers many prestigious universities.

The Banking Industry Architecture Network e.V (BIAN) welcomes three new members to its fast growing global network today, creating an international network of 60 of the leading banks, service providers, software vendors and academic partners.

The international software and BPO provider Avaloq, Lebanese banking core applications developer BML Istisharat and financial services technology provider Fiserv, will now work with the current members to continue to develop the standardised IT framework for the banking industry.

Ipreo, a global leader of data, market intelligence and productivity solutions to capital markets and corporate professionals, today announced the acquisition of iLEVEL, a leading portfolio monitoring, analytics and transparency platform for global private capital markets. iLEVEL will be merged with Ipreo's Alternative Assets group to form a new Private Capital Markets division within Ipreo.

Rackspace® (NYSE: RAX), the #1 managed cloud company, today announced a collaboration with Intel® Corporation to form the OpenStack Innovation Center. This center of excellence will help accelerate the development of enterprise capabilities and significantly add to the number of developers contributing to upstream OpenStack code. The project will bring together OpenStack engineers from Rackspace and Intel to advance the scalability, manageability and reliability of OpenStack by adding new features, functionality and eliminating bugs through upstream code contributions.

Located in England, the MasterCard DigiSec Lab is focused on proactively testing threats to all forms of digital payments in coordination with government security agencies and leading academics.

WorldRemit, the ‘WhatsApp of money’, today launches instant Mobile Money transfers to Sri Lanka.

PayPal today announced that they have teamed up with TransferTo, a global airtime remittance leader, to offer mobile airtime top-up in Canada. Without any transfer fees, Canadians can now use their PayPal account to instantly top-up prepaid mobile phones of their relatives and friends that are registered with over 400 carriers in more than 100 countries.

BPC Banking Technologies, the leading provider of Open System payment solutions, together with Palestine Monetary Authority (PMA) announces the launch of the National Switch of Palestine. The National Switch, based on SmartVista, is considered a cornerstone for the Electronic Retail Payments in Palestine.

As the Bank of Mauritius (BOM) embarks on an ambitious journey to make reporting by banks in the region more timely, accurate and consistent, it has also opted for XBRL as the ideal reporting taxonomy.

The mission features two key milestones -

EXIN and Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd are joining forces for the development of ICT professionals based on the e-Competence Framework (e-CF). This partnership, signed in Beijing, is a breakthrough for Huawei, a leading global ICT solutions provider, and EXIN, a leading international certification institute in the ICT domain, opening up a new route for the development of ICT competences.