Europe

China UnionPay is assembling the relationships it needs to directly issue cards in Europe, but local saturation suggests UnionPay’s best bet is to use European merchant relationships to counter its own domestic rivals in China rather than disrupting Visa and Mastercard.

Seven European banks are testing Swift's Global Payments Innovation real-time cross-border payments through the continent's Target Instant Payment Settlement process.

Visa's tokenization began as a way to shield digital commerce and has developed into a major catalyst for Visa in landing partnerships.

While the European Union positions itself as one common, homogeneous market, the reality is that the European e-commerce market is very diverse with both leaders and laggards.

The U.S. and Europe should continue to harmonize their banking rules, including for foreign banking operations, just as they did in the wake of the financial crisis.

Japanese credit card brand JCB is working with Viva Wallet to build its merchant base in Europe as part of its ongoing expansion to new global markets.

China's massive card network UnionPay has signed a merchant acquiring agreement with Worldline to bring acceptance of UnionPay cards into 40,000 merchant locations across northwest Europe.

Marqeta has launched a digital banking solution for European fintechs and signed three customers to use it: Aplazame, Morning and Yapeal.

Silicon Valley, New York, London and several of China’s largest cities are the world’s leading fintech hubs, but many other locales are gunning for their crown.

The initial public offering of payment-service company Nexi SpA raised 2.01 billion euros ($2.3 billion), making it the biggest listing in Europe so far this year and the third major IPO of a payment-processing institution in the region in less than a year.