Europe

Merchant acquirer Credorax has engaged money transfer company Small World Financial and other partners to cover a broader mix of banking and payment acceptance available to the companies' European clients.

For many banks, especially midtier institutions, payments isn’t a core business — and their batch processing-based legacy systems weren’t designed to deliver real-time payments.

European mobile wallet providers Bluecode, ePassi, Momo pocket, Pagaqui, Pivo, and Vipps are working together with China's Alipay for the first time to promote a unified, interoperable QR code that would connect Europe's current fragmented mobile payment landscape.

The former Barclays CEO turned bank investor said he sees more opportunity in smaller, newer banks.

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.

With the U.K. government still at stalemate over Brexit, the prospect of leaving the European Union without a deal remains a very real possibility. Despite some recent agreements, this could have major implications for the U.K. payments industry.

Because various aspects of the General Data Protection Regulation were made public two years before they became official law, European lawmakers naturally felt it gave companies plenty of time to get data security compliance in place. But it appears most companies either lost track of time or haven't solved the compliance puzzle yet.

Global payments provider Elavon has established a new partnership with Societe Generale for payments acceptance and acquiring services throughout Europe.

Bank technology giants FIS and Fiserv are spending nearly $66 billion between them in just the past few weeks to add a broad swath of payments technology — including a few key nuggets that will help them go toe to toe with fintechs.

Given the size of the deal — which includes about $9 billion of Worldpay’s debt on top of a $34 billion bid — the pressure’s on to build a global powerhouse that can counter other major fintech mergers announced in the past weeks. FIS must also emerge as a nimble rival to the startups that threaten the old order.

European banks need to look beyond their home countries for mergers in order to tap the region's full economic power and become more competitive, JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said.