Europe

In the past few years the Chinese government has loosened restrictions on foreign travel, enabling millions of its citizenry to visit foreign lands. Along with a greater ability to travel is the enhanced prosperity Chinese consumers have reaped at home — and now bring with them on vacations to purchase foreign goods.

Two German companies, Wirecard and the startup givve, are expanding their partnership to develop more programs for companies to deliver employee benefits via prepaid cards.

Europe has also taken active measures to support the innovation of platforms and applications, writes Donika Kreava, strategic communications manager at Dentacoin.

The European data sharing regulation, PSD2, is often seen as a compliance burden for banks — but if used correctly, the rules provide a path to boosting digital payments revenue.

After three months of testing its cryptocurrency wallet, Plasma Bank has launched PlasmaPay globally with an emphasis on Southeast Asia and South America.

London-based TransferGo is using Ripple’s blockchain platform to support digital money transfers from Europe to India. But TransferGo isn’t the first remittance company to work with Ripple — and it isn't on the same path that others have taken.

In a continued effort to expand beyond China's borders, China UnionPay will reportedly work with a U.K. company to issue issuing virtual corporate cards next month in Europe.

Processing.com has 25 acquiring banks lined up as its transaction network, creating a safety net for dealing with high-risk merchants.

Under TrueLayer’s Payment Initiation license, its forthcoming Payments API could enable third parties such as online retailers to have consent-based access to customers’ bank accounts in order to take payments for goods and services. This would provide e-commerce merchants and service providers with a lower-cost alternative to accepting credit or debit card payments.

Understanding the obstacles of payment gateways and how to navigate them can help you expand your business and scale profits efficiently, writes Olivier Schott, founder and chief marketing officer of Scalefast.

Maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's progress — in recent weeks, a number of large payment networks have suffered brief but widespread outages, particularly in Europe.

Mastercard and Worldpay are embarking on a strong push to promote Mastercard's Pay by Bank system, which will likely face a deluge of competition under the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which took effect this year.

Overreliance on the smartphone risks mistaking device authentication for user authentication.

Mastercard has become the latest major card network to suffer a high profile crash. With its Thursday incident coming hard on the heels of Visa’s crash last month many experts wonder if blockchain technology could prevent future card network outages.

Financial institutions are beginning to get on board with the global fight against climate change, but they are still trailing pension funds and insurance companies in putting these concerns into action.

When GDPR went into effect in May, it was expected that the European law would touch a lot of U.S. payment companies because of their international scope. Now it's clear that even purely domestic U.S. firms will have to adhere to some version of the data-privacy law.

A money-laundering scandal at Denmark's largest bank has prompted increased regulatory scrutiny at larger banks, so criminals may try to filter dirty money at smaller institutions, a regulator warned.

Nets has been a dominant payments technology player in the Nordic region for years, helping to drive the region's high proportion of mobile and digital transactions. Armed with fresh venture capital funding, Nets wants to expand its influence broadly across Europe.

As Nvoicepay expands, the payment automation company is keeping an eye on how it may fall under European data rules that have a knack for requiring compliance even from companies that should be exempt.

Wirecard is developing a fleet card platform enabling companies to control fuel and other vehicle expenses through an open-loop system with Visa payment cards.