The 5-year-old company, which recently raised $131 million, says its strong growth reflects the timeliness of its mission: helping consumers who live paycheck to paycheck build wealth.

Marqeta, a payments startup backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Visa Inc., hired underwriters for a planned 2021 initial public offering, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Stripe Inc. is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it higher than its last private valuation of $36 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

For years, business models based around micropayments have been touted as an alternative to advertising, offering a new form of revenue for all kinds of content creators, enabling users to pay for the exact quantity of services they consume. They have even been suggested as a way to create alternative insurance products, for example forms of car insurance where drivers pay per journey.

CEO Wendy Cai-Lee says Piermont Bank can do it all for financial technology firms: be their commercial banker, be their banking-as-a-service provider and develop APIs and other cutting-edge products for them.

Many countries are positioning themselves as a destination for fintechs seeking EU-wide licenses as the U.K. leaves the EU. Following Brexit, U.K. electronic money and payments institution licenses across the EU won’t be passportable across the EU.

In an open letter, industry veteran Thomas Vartanian outlines the steps the administration can take to encourage innovation, better detect cyber threats and modernize regulation.

While digital pay innovation was once seen as a “nice-to-have” benefit, it's quickly becoming integral to business survival, says LendingFront's Jorge Sun.

Within the payments industry, Wirecard as a brand has become almost like Enron — but an exec at Railsbank says the German processor's fall from grace masks talent and innovation that can thrive elsewhere and help forge new paths to financial services.

The success of some fintechs in getting bank charters this year only underscores how onerous the process remains for many others. That’s unlikely to change unless policymakers reconsider what it means to be a bank.