Dear Subscriber,

No sooner does the ink dry on our story about Square’s new APIs for online and offline payments, than Braintree launches a new tool called Auth to let its customers integrate payments tools from partners including Venmo, Apple Pay and Coinbase. It’s fair to say that competition in payments continues to sizzle. In today’s newsletter we explore the latest some of the latest products hitting the space and what’s ahead for the industry. Elsewhere we check out fresh funding for the French bockchain space in the shape of Paris-based Stratumn, hear from Azimo co-founder Michael Kent what the future of remittance looks like and analyse the latest movements on real time payments. Enjoy!

Real-time payment infrastructures are spreading around the world with projects in Australia, the US and EU set to join Singapore, UK, India, Denmark and many other countries. The time is now for these payment backbones, but why are they popular, can they help banks retain customers and are they standardised yet on ISO20022, asks Neil Ainger.

Square, which made its name with mobile card readers to help merchants accept payments in-store, is now going after the online check-out to do the same for e-commerce payments. The San Francisco-based payments company just launched a new API designed to let developers embed Square’s payment processing platform directly into their app or website.

As the world economies grow ever more connected and travel more accessible, remittances become an ever-more vital piece of the FinTech puzzle. Here PaymentEye’s Lucinda Beeman asks Michael Kent, founder and CEO of Azimo, what’s next for this vibrant market.

There’s more funding for Blockchain related startups this week as Stratumn scores €600,000 for its development platform, designed to provide the infrastructure to help ideas take flight. The company says it wants to remove barriers to building, deploying and running blockchain apps.

The threat of payments fraud is on the rise and while continued reliance on cheques makes businesses vulnerable to attack, business emails are increasingly popular for fraudsters.