U.K.

Jenifer Swallow has been here before, feeling the excitement of being in in an industry that was about to change commerce forever.

Barclays is partnering with digital rewards companies as part of its focus on investing in fintech and developing new business models. Its recent investment in Bink, a U.K.-based loyalty platform provider, marks the fourth company in this field that Barclays has partnered with.

Laybuy, a New Zealand-based payment processing firm that allows customers to pay for purchases in installments, is launching in the U.K.

Mastercard has dropped out of a recent bidding war with Visa to acquire Earthport, announcing it will instead buy Transfast, a different cross-border payments firm.

The Bank of England is requiring Visa to appoint PwC as an independent third party to review the card brand’s progress in implementing recommendations that followed a 2018 outage in Europe.

Chinese mobile payment apps Alipay and WeChat Pay have made deep inroads into Western markets, and now UnionPay, China’s state-run card network, is catching up.

Barclays is preparing to merge its wearable mobile payments product BPay with its more popular Pingit app, after it struggled to attract users.

Revolut has caught the attention of U.K. regulators over money laundering compliance, a predicament that sheds light on issues faced by the entire digital financial services industry.

Revolut Ltd., the fast-growing financial technology startup, is facing regulatory scrutiny following an alleged compliance lapse that could have allowed illegal transactions on its app.

With Brexit on the horizon, the U.K.’s new agriculture bill is expected to drastically change the payments landscape for U.K. farmers — most notably through a new payments scheme known as the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS).