Kate Fitzgerald

The information you need to start your day, from PaymentsSource and around the Web: M-Pesa teams with Ant Financial; Amex buys LoungeBuddy; NatWest's biometric card; and more.

Our annual Most Influential Women in Payments feature, now in its seventh year, highlights the women who are creating change and opportunities in the payments industry. For the first time, the editors of PaymentsSource have also recognized one woman for lifetime achievement.

When longtime TSYS finance executive Theresa Gongora was promoted to CFO and senior vice president of TSYS' Merchant Solutions unit last year, she was struck by the dramatic changes in the payments industry since joining TSYS 15 years ago.

Julie Pukas can blame her innate curiosity about people for her success in the payments industry, where she’s used her keen listening and networking skills to help solve one gnarly problem after another at large organizations.

One thing that excites Kim Bynan most about her job is seeing firsthand how new payments technology changes our everyday lives.

The past six years have been a whirlwind for King, who had no experience in the payments industry before becoming CEO of Featurespace, the fast-growing U.K. startup enabling banks to use machine-learning technology to block payment card fraud.

In a career spanning four decades, Diane Faro has led one payment company after another through major transitions to successful outcomes.

Over five years as CEO of WEX, Melissa Smith has led the international corporate payments company through several quarters of growth through organic expansion and acquisitions. One of her signature moves is the artful use of partnerships to extend WEX’s payments technology in the fuel card, health care and travel sectors.

Merchant terminals—the longtime bedrock technology of the payments industry—are rapidly evolving, and few people have a better view than Jennifer Miles, executive vice president of North America for France-based payment terminal maker Ingenico.

Mastercard has dropped out of a recent bidding war with Visa to acquire Earthport, announcing it will instead buy Transfast, a different cross-border payments firm.

In a new, global twist to its ongoing Visa Everywhere competition, Visa is targeting female entrepreneurs who are looking for the right technology to solve their payment-related business problems.

Even as Uber drivers and other gig-economy workers gained the ability to be paid every couple of hours through debit push payments, other workers still had to wait for a batched paycheck.

Fuel-card giant FleetCor has been working to diversify its payments operations by expanding corporate payments services, and now it’s buying Nvoicepay to speed up the process.

Chinese mobile payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay have made deep inroads into Western markets, and now UnionPay, China’s state-run card network, is catching up.

Wirecard and Cimple Marketing have teamed with Estonia-based cruise ship operator Tallink Grupp to enable shops on its 14 vessels to accept China’s top three payment options.

Many fintech startups are working to streamline various aspects of payment acceptance for global online merchants, and Modo wants to give those merchants more control over the payment service processors they use.

Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) is launching its first credit card through Japan’s expanding JCB card network, targeting young adults who like to travel throughout Asia.

As the cross-border B2B payments segment drives new activity among partners and investors, TransferMate has teamed up with Tradeshift, a startup specializing in payments within the supply-chain marketplace.

Mobile payments adoption is patchy, but it's getting a higher profile in social media.

Japan’s Mizuho Bank will unveil a digital currency platform next month with an app enabling customers to pay at participating merchants with the new J-Coin Pay via a QR code.