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Whish Money Partners With Mastercard For Cross Border Payments
Users in Lebanon can send money abroad to over 50 countries, while Lebanese people living overseas can send money home.
Whish Money, Lebanon’s leading e-wallet and personal finance app, has partnered with Mastercard to unlock faster inbound and outbound remittances for consumers across the country. The tie-up taps into Mastercard Move, the company’s global money movement network, to allow users in Lebanon to send funds to more than 50 countries — and for Lebanese abroad to send money home in near real time.
Through the Whish Money mobile app, users can now make cost-effective transfers to a wide range of destinations. Depending on the recipient’s market, senders can choose how funds are delivered: directly into bank accounts, mobile wallets, or collected as cash. Customers can also fund their Whish Money wallets with cards as well as cash, expanding convenience for everyday users. This marks Mastercard’s first collaboration with a mobile wallet in Lebanon to facilitate remittances.
“Many people in Lebanon rely on remittances from their family members abroad to meet their basic needs. In this challenging economic situation, international money transfer services provide a vital inflow of foreign currency into Lebanon. Thanks to Mastercard Move, we can now offer fast, efficient and secure remittances to Lebanese people,” said Toufic Koussa, Co-founder and CEO of Whish Money.
Onur Kursun, Executive Vice President of Commercial and New Payment Flows, EEMEA at Mastercard, added: “Our collaboration will give Whish Money the reach, transparency and speed needed to scale its cross-border business and address consumer demand for sending and receiving funds internationally. Meanwhile, it will enable us to expand our payment network and introduce market firsts for inbound and outbound money transfers in Lebanon. We look forward to working together to improve the lives of Lebanese people and address their everyday needs”.
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According to World Bank estimates, Lebanon was the third-largest recipient of remittances in the MENA region in 2022, receiving around US$6.4 billion. Only Egypt (US$28.3 billion) and Morocco (US$11.2 billion) recorded larger inflows. For Lebanese residents, remittances are both a lifeline and a source of foreign currency, meaning the Whish Mastercard collaboration could soon prove to be transformative.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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