Kate Fitzgerald

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.

French banking giant Crédit Agricole’s payments unit has signed a deal with Wirecard to develop an integrated payment acceptance and acquiring platform serving large merchants.

Despite increased bank and investor activity around digital P2P payments, consumers haven't flocked to P2P in expected numbers.

Are the incentives for protecting card data so lopsided that merchants feel little need to do more? Or is it wrong to ask merchants to fix the faults in a payment card ecosystem they had little hand in creating?

A new cobranded Uber debit card from Green Dot’s GoBank unit gives drivers 3% cash back if they choose PIN entry when filling their tanks at ExxonMobil stations, affirming the persistence of PINs in an increasingly digital payments environment.

Elizabeth Rossiello heard that cryptocurrencies would be the next big thing so she founded BitPesa. And while she benefited from the initial craze around bitcoin and blockchain, her company also shares bitcoin's reputational wounds.

Midigator, which markets software to help e-commerce merchants manage payment card chargebacks, has received $30 million in funding from private equity firm LLR Partners to further develop the product.

China’s Alipay mobile wallet is now accepted by airport retailers in the Middle East and Africa through a collaboration between Qatar Airways and Wirecard.

Despite more bank and investor activity around digital P2P payments, consumer usage of P2P is a mixed bag.

Bank of America is giving its small-business credit card customers some of the key features of the credit card rewards it offers consumers.