Europe

Development is happening in places besides London and Silicon Valley, and that will give payment companies and financial institutions a wider range of technology solutions and partners, according to Aidan Hayes, senior vice president of financial services and technology for Enterprise Ireland.

Businesses are already entering partnerships with some of the biggest players in the Chinese payments market, such as AliPay, and WeChat Pay, with the goal of offering tourists the ease of payments that they are accustomed to, writes Igal Rotem, CEO of Credorax.

Wirecard has partnered with Garmin to enable payment acceptance at contactless-enabled payment terminals across Europe through boon, Wirecard’s mobile payment platform.

The open banking model is not very different from what Amazon brought about in retail. Banks have little choice but to embrace the concept, according to Nick Frankland, managing director of fintech at Legal and General.

The bank and European air carriers are hoping to cut into air fare payment fees that are as high as $8 billion per year.

Wirecard has expanded capabilities of its boon digital payment app by partnering with Fitbit so customers in Europe may make contactless payments with the Fitbit Ionic or Fitbit Versa smartwatch models.

Global policymakers are all over the map when it comes to regulating cryptocurrencies. But industry participants are eager to have some direction — and soon.

U.K.-based companies WorldRemit and Lebara have formed a strategic partnership that will give Lebara’s 3 million mobile telecom customers direct access to WorldRemit’s digital money transfer service.

Digital money transfer provider SimbaPay has added an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot that will enable banks and other companies to offer international money transfer to customers across Africa and Europe through text messaging.

PSD2's open banking wave is attracting lots of attention from payments technology firms, and Zafin is making moves to cement its place in the market.

The IATA said it's investigating how to apply faster payments to passengers, whether directly from the airline or indirectly via travel agents. Globally, airlines absorb more than $8 billion in costs for merchant fees and fraud.

Retailers and payment service providers will need to report on at least a quarterly basis on performance against the reference fraud rates, writes Matthew Attwell, Risk & Client Services director at The ai Corporation.

Limited data on fraud is a widely recognized issue and it was decided that incorporation into PSD2 was the most appropriate way to enforce a requirement, writes Matthew Attwell of The ai Corporation.

Timothy Bowler, president of the ICE Benchmark Administration, which has been responsible for calculating the index since mid-2013, argues that there is a strong case for keeping it going.

If they haven't already, card-issuing banks will soon receive a shock when the speed of PSD2's requirements becomes clear. Payments will have to happen faster, and the deadline to make that happen is fast approaching.

Wirecard has gained a foothold in using virtual prepaid cards to streamline corporate payments across business units, platforms and borders for companies with sprawling operations. Now the German company wants to do the same for more U.S. companies going global.

In many ways, the goal of the GDPR is to increase difficulty for a hacker, while also flipping the rights of data ownership back to the European consumer. U.S. companies that serve European consumers are obligated to follow the regulations.

Global payment and fraud prevention provider Pelican is bringing its faster payments system to the North America market after working within the European SEPA Instant Payments scheme last year.

PCI compliance won't be enough to meet the strict requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation, which takes hold May 25 in Europe.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has launched an application programming interface (API) gateway available to third-party fintech providers, as part of preparations for Europe’s PSD2 regulations that went into effect this month.