Brazil

Credicard, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Citigroup Inc., has signed a binding agreement with Elavon, a wholly-owned subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp and leading global payments provider, for the establishment of a joint venture which will be a merchant services company offering payment solutions to the Brazilian marketplace.

Combined with Credicard’s market expertise and brand recognition, Elavon will deliver a robust processing platform, financial efficiency, innovative payment solutions and secure point-of-sale devices for mobile acceptance environments.

Brazilian bank Itau Unibanco entered into a cooperation agreement with China UnionPay Co Ltd (CUP). Under this partnership CUP clients with their 2.2 billion credit and debit cards will be able to withdraw at over 30,000 Itau ATMs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Shanghai-based CUP has over 400 associated institutions, domestic and foreign. It is present in over 90 countries.

The Western Union Company announced that it had been granted license approvals from the Brazilian Central Bank and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to operate a commercial bank and foreign exchange brokerage firm in Brazil.

Effective immediately, the license allows Western Union® to offer the Western Union® Money TransferSM services directly to consumers in Brazil and to introduce new financial services, including domestic money transfers, consumer bill payments and prepaid cards.

On Tuesday the search engine giant Google unveiled a new tool that shows the number of requests the governments make to receive private information about the users of the website. The tool showed that Brazil and the US were on the top of the list by the number of demands. Thus, Brazil sought information 3,663 times in the last six months of 2009 followed by the US with 3,580.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure by companies in emerging markets is becoming an increasingly important issue of concern to sustainability investors in the developed world. The Emerging Market Disclosure Project (EMD Project) is an initiative whose aim is to improve sustainability disclosure in emerging markets.

Visa Inc.’s Brazilian affiliate plans to sell stock in the world’s biggest initial share sale in a year, seeking to tap investor demand in a nation where credit card use is growing more than 20 % annually. Shareholders of Cia. Brasileira de Meios de Pagamentos, the Sao Paulo-based processor of payments for the largest credit card network, aim to raise 5.7 billion reais to 7.2 billion reais ($2.9 billion to $3.6 billion) in the June 25 sale.

Brazilian outstanding bank lending expanded for second consecutive month, the latest sign that Latin America’s largest economy is pulling out of its deepest contraction in over a decade. The central bank of Brasilia today decalred that state and non-state bank lending rose 0.4 % to 1.25 trillion reais ($621 billion) last month from a revised 1.24 trillion reais in March. Lending climbed 22.6 % from the same month last year.

The Brazilian unit of Visa Inc, Brasileira de Meios de Pagamento, known as VisaNet, filed to sell shares, resuming plans it called off last September because of the fallout in global credit markets. VisaNet hired Bradesco BBI, the investment banking unit of Brazil's second largest private sector bank, to manage the offering of an undisclosed amount of common shares, the company said in a securities filing.