John Adams

The coronavirus stimulus package has resurrected calls for the U.S. government to offer a central bank digital currency, public mobile wallets and postal banking—controversial ideas that are hard to pull off, but exist outside the U.S. and could dent interchange fees and private stablecoin projects like Facebook’s Libra.

In the battle to control consumer data, Visa has made a major score by agreeing to acquire Plaid, a technology company that it could have seen grow into a competitor.

Mastercard is aggressively building a business payments ecosystem as it keeps an eye on political headwinds it has little control over.

Responding to the fast pace of payments technology and its impact on privacy and data security, Mastercard plans to recruit a range of companies, educational institutions and agencies to produce a set of best practices.

Venmo’s P2P social payment app has become a major part of PayPal’s retail strategy, a play that’s getting a boost from a Synchrony co-branded credit card.

As regulatory pushback against Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency has accelerated, keeping the project together has become a major challenge, with Visa, Mastercard, Visa, eBay and Stripe joining PayPal in leaving the project.

Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency project has lost its first major ally. PayPal — where the head of Facebook's Libra project once served as president — has cut its ties. As a founding member, PayPal was expected to drive the payment-specific part of the cryptocurrency initiative.

Wolverton has been accumulating responsibility and influence at Synovus in recent years and is the highest ranking woman at the company.

Giants like Facebook, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart are all pushing blockchain for myriad use cases, and now Wells Fargo has joined the fray with its own spin on the distributed ledger technology.

PNC has gone live on RippleNet, giving the blockchain company a major win in its effort to build a real-time cross-border payments network that includes large U.S. banks.