Payment News

Payment Resilience Centre Stage

Japan has recently experienced a system failure that affected credit card payments at transportation hubs and shops. The outage affected multiple card companies and was reported to be due to a malfunction in Japan Card Network’s system.

Australia’s second largest telecommunication system, operated by Optus, recently went down, causing widespread disruption for its ten million customers for over 11 hours. In October Singapore also experienced an outage that lasted over 12 hours for customers of DBS and Citibank.

Dependence on digital payments makes payment systems key infrastructure.

M-Pesa Surging in Ethiopia

Safaricom started its M-Pesa service in Ethiopia in mid-August. Its half-year report says it already has 1.2 million users in the country. It is estimated that only 35% of Ethiopians are financially included.