The Asia Thing: In China, the government has effectively mandated a single payment network, YingLian (or China UniPay), which affects all banks and cards. Innovation is thus low and all things move slowly. Online payment portals typically require the entry of card details, a web redirect to the issuer bank in question, and the entry of further authentication credentials. With credit card penetration shockingly low, this is still the norm. People frequently still line up at a bank to send money to other provinces. With Google Play purchases blocked in China, mobile payments for non iDevice users (Apple devices are considered the de-facto luxury standard; contrast Indonesia where this is still BlackBerry) are still 'out there'. Interestingly but somewhat tangentially, the YingLian network is expanding quickly, notably with Chinese banks opening worldwide and particularly in Southeast Asia, where it is often accessible via local banks' ATMs along with Visa and Mastercard networks (the typical western global ATM network, Cirrus/Maestro, is AFAIK owned by Mastercard, which itself is owned by Bank of America). This helps to provide backing for the Chinese Yuan Renminbi (CNY) as a regional reserve currency, serving a geopolitical interest.
US-wise: I integrated in-App payments for the flagship preloaded app on behalf of a major Android device vendor who you can probably guess with AT&T and T-Mobile. One of those carriers was completely unable to block consumers calling up and retroactively renegging on payments via their customer service center; ie. fraud issues. Both of them seemed to outsource their internal billing systems to AMDOCS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) who at least partly hosted those systems offsite(!), and are an Israeli, widely thought to be Mossad-backed and intelligence-gathering oriented company. This is something of an open secret in the international mobile carrier space. Smart cookies, those Israelis!
International: Outside of credit and debit card networks, which are basically US owned and operated with the exception of China's emerging YingLian network, SWIFT is the major international payment facilitator. Check this out: http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/intra_european_financial_... .. plus linked FOI requests. All SWIFT transactions have been fed to the US unfiltered since 'at least' 2001 (source: European Data Protection Supervisor), and probably since the founding of their first 'international operations center' in Virginia (~CIA HQ), in 1979. Indeed, to the casual observer, SWIFT appears to be a successful combination American Express/CIA project from that era.
US-wise: I integrated in-App payments for the flagship preloaded app on behalf of a major Android device vendor who you can probably guess with AT&T and T-Mobile. One of those carriers was completely unable to block consumers calling up and retroactively renegging on payments via their customer service center; ie. fraud issues. Both of them seemed to outsource their internal billing systems to AMDOCS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs) who at least partly hosted those systems offsite(!), and are an Israeli, widely thought to be Mossad-backed and intelligence-gathering oriented company. This is something of an open secret in the international mobile carrier space. Smart cookies, those Israelis!
International: Outside of credit and debit card networks, which are basically US owned and operated with the exception of China's emerging YingLian network, SWIFT is the major international payment facilitator. Check this out: http://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/intra_european_financial_... .. plus linked FOI requests. All SWIFT transactions have been fed to the US unfiltered since 'at least' 2001 (source: European Data Protection Supervisor), and probably since the founding of their first 'international operations center' in Virginia (~CIA HQ), in 1979. Indeed, to the casual observer, SWIFT appears to be a successful combination American Express/CIA project from that era.