Kate Fitzgerald

PayPal and Barclays have formed a strategic partnership enabling Barclays customers in the U.K. and U.S. to manage their Barclays and PayPal accounts within each app.

U.S. Bank has formed a partnership with insurance claims software provider Enservio to simplify processes for paying or collecting insurance settlements.

Consumers enrolled in Denmark’s Dankort domestic payments scheme may sign up to make payments using only their finger in a pilot that the payments firm Nets is conducting in Copenhagen.

The partnership PayPal announced last year with Samsung Pay has come to fruition, with PayPal rolling out a new capability enabling its users to make purchases at any store that accepts cards via Samsung Pay.

Walmart has also used Sam's Club's Scan & Go fast checkout feature and even robots in an attempt to shorten queues and improve the payment experience.

Though financial institutions with online bill payment services still command the largest share of the bill payment market, it’s a category with many friction points ripe for disruption.

Before Paytm became one of India's most popular mobile wallets, it was a little-known bill payment app that launched in 2011 and spread by word of mouth. Now Paytm is revisiting that history in Canada, though its challenges in North America are very different than what it faced in India.

The bank-led P2P service Zelle is on track to move more than $100 billion at its first anniversary in June — a milestone that is at odds with overall consumer awareness of digital P2P options.

Wirecard has expanded capabilities of its boon digital payment app by partnering with Fitbit so customers in Europe may make contactless payments with the Fitbit Ionic or Fitbit Versa smartwatch models.

Mastercard has hired Michael Froman, who was a top trade adviser to former President Obama, as the card brand’s vice chairman and president of strategic growth.

Gemalto is working with Lebanon-based areeba to test a biometric contactless Visa EMV card in the Middle East that uses a fingerprint to authorize transactions.

Paysafe is buying iPayment Holdings, a processor with a similar focus in the U.S.

Longtime payments industry executive Kim Crawford Goodman has been named president of card services at Fiserv, where she will oversee the payments and ATM services, including credit and debit processing.

Processing firm Galileo has built an API to bridge the gap between cryptocurrencies and mainstream payments, an area where a handful of other providers are experimenting. Large banks and card networks continue to keep their distance.

The rapid adoption of voice assistants only adds to the notion they could one day be disruptors in commerce, payments and financial services.

Voice assistants are on a fast track, with ownership of home devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home surging to between 20% and 25% of households from a mere 1% in about two years. The rapid growth is inviting keen interest in many circles about the potential for voice assistants to spark disruption in commerce, payments and financial services.

U.K.-based companies WorldRemit and Lebara have formed a strategic partnership that will give Lebara’s 3 million mobile telecom customers direct access to WorldRemit’s digital money transfer service.

The card networks recently admitted what consumers have long suspected—card signatures have become worthless for authentication at the point of sale. But that's not the end of this story.

So far, U.K. fintechs' options range from relocating to other countries to finding ways to offset negative effects by attempting to “Brexit-proof” their businesses. The latter option can still be a substantial undertaking.

MoviePass has purchased Moviefone, the movie listing and information service, in a deal that gives momentum to a business that owes its success to honor-all-cards rules.