John Adams

Digital upstarts like Square, Stripe and PayPal are invading community banks' turf by appealing to local merchants with a mix of electronic payments and lending. Small banks are fighting back by leaning into digital services while maintaining their personal touch.

The Indiana-based online banking pioneer is purchasing First Century, a similarly tech-savvy company, for $80 million. The deal would diversify its revenue and improve its prepaid card offerings for small businesses.

Fintechs have begun offering consumers installment-lending options to pay for airfare, putting competitive pressure on banks and credit unions that rely on travelers for significant credit card volume.

European authorities have linked the operation to investment scams that predate its sale to ING in 2018.

The card network plans to use technology acquired from CipherTrace to offer compliance and risk management services to firms that handle digital assets.

The partnership — combining one of the biggest buy now/pay later lenders with one of the major digital payment companies — gives merchants a compelling new offering that could enable Klarna to take wallet share away from traditional card issuers.

Steve Squeri said installment lenders primarily cater to debit card users and that even American Express's own BNPL product does not compete with the company's credit and charge cards.

After Visa's deal to acquire Plaid fell through as a result of regulatory pressure, the data aggregator found new fintech partners including Square and Dwolla to support an account-to-account transfer service.

The social network's test of its Novi wallet drew criticism from Democratic senators who say the company does not have a strong track record of protecting user data.

The payment company has agreed to buy the India-based reconciliation company in its latest investment in back-office technology for internet businesses.