Bailey Reutzel

As Coinbase makes its services available in the U.K., Ripple Labs is making inroads with Western Union.

Even if you don't care about Bitcoin, you could use the technology that enables it. Companies like Eris and Factom are working on practical applications that banks would find handy, with use cases ranging from acquisitions to securitizations.

For more than a decade, U.S. regulators have been advising bankers to know more about their customers than who they are. In the next five years that may become the global norm as technology allows more granular transaction monitoring.

Swift, the global financial messaging provider, is unlikely to bid for control of the U.S. real-time payments systems. But there will be other countries needing aid with the development of faster payment technology.

Increasingly, the goal of more payments providers — from megabanks like Wells Fargo to startups like YoYo — is to hide the fact that they are payments providers.

Banks may be far less nimble than tech startups, but that isn't stopping financial institutions from opening fintech accelerators throughout the world. But is this work part of a sincere desire for innovation, or just a series of vanity projects?

The San Francisco bank has added three more young technology firms to its accelerator program, which is aimed at adapting products from outside the financial services world for creative uses in banking.

The University of Nicosia has been pretty bullish on Bitcoin. But it's not just that the digital currency reduces international transfer costs; Bitcoin's rise also pressures traditional financial institutions to lower their fees more generally.

No two digital wallets are alike, but there is a growing interest within the payments industry in standardizing a base layer for digital payments.

The number of merchants and vendors that care about addressing fraud and managing risk has decreased over the past year, as their attention drifts to the complexity of new payment systems.

Uber recently changed its model in India to more appropriately serve the local population, welcoming auto rickshaws and cash payments. But these changes are unlikely to tackle the bigger issues the ride-sharing service faces in the country.

There’s a fintech rivalry brewing between New York City and London. But in terms of transit payments, London is winning with an interoperable contactless system that runs more smoothly than New York's MetroCard.

While having direct access to the U.K.’s real-time transaction network might not lower costs for non-banks, it will allow providers to make their own risk decisions.

E-commerce gateway Klarna will soon launch in the U.S., the latest Swedish payment company to seek market share in the country.

Mobile money transfer platform nTrust has expanded its merchant partner network, adding fashion retailers, antique stores, food trucks and bars.

The Asia-Pacific region has historically been the last target for U.S. corporate expansion. But fast advances in m-commerce are proving irresistible for outside payment companies.

Seamless' strategy for its mobile wallet, SEQR, is simple and obvious: You can't scale internationally if you don't launch a product internationally.

The U.K. is ahead of the U.S. in nearly every aspect of payments, except for mobile or remote deposit capture—a technology designed for checks, which are in decline but still a preferred payment choice for a couple of industries.

Mobile commerce is blurring the lines between card-present and card-not-present transactions, possibly even making the distinction—and the difference in pricing—irrelevant.

It took a decade and a government mandate for the U.K. banking industry to develop a set of rails to transfer funds from one bank account to another in seconds.