Media & Entertainment

PayPal to halt operations in Turkey after losing license, impacts ‘hundreds of thousands’

Comment

Image Credits:

Turkey has been making moves to bring tech business in the country under more localised control, and today big U.S. online payments company PayPal became the latest casualty. The company announced that it is suspending business operations in Turkey effective June 6, after failing to obtain a new license for its services.

The closure, PayPal told TechCrunch, will affect tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of consumers.

A spokesperson confirmed the closure and also the reason behind it in two separate statements to TechCrunch.

The first statement closely follows the message in Turkish on PayPal’s local site regarding the denial of a license from the financial regulator BDDK.

“We are sorry to announce that PayPal is suspending its business operations in Turkey,” the company noted in a written note. “Effective from June 6, 2016, our customers in Turkey will no longer be able to send or receive funds with PayPal. Customers will still be able to log in to their PayPal accounts and withdraw any balance on their accounts to a Turkish bank account.

“Supporting our customers is very important to PayPal. However, we have no choice but to suspend processing payments in Turkey as our application for a Turkish payments license has been denied by the local financial regulator and we have been instructed to suspend our Turkish business operations.”

Asked why the license was denied, the spokesperson said that it was a result of new rules that require IT systems to be localized in the country. PayPal distributes its IT across several global hubs.

“Our suspension of services is a result of new national regulations overseen by the BDDK that require PayPal to fully localize our information technology systems in Turkey,” the spokesperson said. “We respect Turkey’s desire to have information technology infrastructure deployed within its borders, however, PayPal utilizes a global payments platform that operates across more than 200 markets, rather than maintaining local payments platforms with dedicated technology infrastructure in any single country.”

It’s not clear how many data centers PayPal — which split from parent eBay in 2015 and is valued at $46 billion — has globally, or which hub handles its Turkish business. We have asked the company and will update as we learn more.

Turkey has been in the tech spotlight in recent months, but not for particularly positive reasons. In April, personal data for some 50 million Turkish citizens (more than half of its population of 80 million) was leaked online, seemingly by an activist (or activists) who were releasing the data to highlight the country’s ageing IT infrastructure, blaming the problem on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his tech policies.

It’s not all about tech, of course. Turkey has been a target for terrorist attacks, and that appears to be at least one reason that some believe Erdogan is justified in his iron fist approach.

Erdogan’s government has been trying to exert more power on the tech sphere than his predecessors, and one area where that has been very apparent up to now has been in social media: sites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in connection with a censorship law in the country that gives the regulator permission to block sites if they host content related to, among other things, porn, drugs, terrorism, illegal file sharing, or anything negative/questionable related to Mustafa Atatürk, the first president of Turkey.

Twitter has gone so far as to file a lawsuit in the country protesting the fine it’s been asked to pay over some of the tweets it has refused to remove.

We’ll continue to monitor this story and see how and if other companies are being affected. One local competitor, Iyzico, is still online.

More TechCrunch

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Everything announced so far

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business