Dear Subscriber,

Prepaid is currently one of the hottest segments in the payments industry and today we dive into the challenges, opportunities and what’s ahead for businesses in this space. Most commonly associated with gift cards, today the technology promises to change everything from the way people get paid, manage their debts and pay for their health care. In today’s newsletter we hear from Talbott Roche, president of Blackhawk Networks, who shares her insights on the B2B adoption of digital payments and the future of prepaid. We also caught up with Jacob de Geer, co-founder and CEO of Europe’s answer to Square: iZettle, to talk data and a future beyond payments. Elsewhere we feature an infographic of FinTech innovation in China, explore wearable payments with FitPay’s new funding and look at Visa’s new open platform for developers.

Starting out as a subsidiary of US supermarket giant Safeway, today Blackhawk Network offers prepaid cards across more than 600 brands and in 24 countries. President of Safeway since 2010, Talbott Roche initially joined the business back in 2001 as assistant VP back when it was still a specialty marketing division of Safeway.

iZettle made a name for itself as ‘Europe’s answer to Square’: a mobile payments company that lets micro businesses like cafes and salons accept card from their customers, but CEO and co-founder Jacob de Geer says it doesn’t see itself as just a payments company.

The end of 2015 could not have been stronger for the Chinese FinTech scene what with Alibaba consumers spending an astounding $14.3 billion on Singles Day and Apple scrambling to make a mark there. The infographic, made by our sister publication Bobsguide, goes a long way to explain just why China’s FinTech scene is so appealing.

FitPay, a wearable payments startup, has managed to secure a $3.1m seed funding round. The interesting thing here is that FitPay isn’t a wearable device, but rather it allows companies that make wearable devices to add contactless payment capabilities to their products.

Visa is opening the door of its payments network to developers in a bid to leverage new innovations and keep pace with how consumer and businesses want to interact with money. The firm is launching Visa Developer, an open platform that it’s describing as a global ‘playground’ for developers.