U.K.

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).

Metro Bank, the lender founded by U.S. entrepreneur Vernon Hill, plunged to a record low after it disclosed that British regulators are probing how it misclassified assets, an incident that prompted a share sale.

The U.K.’s major banks are urging regulators to allow for greater flexibility in processing high-risk transactions, in a bid to tackle ever-rising levels of financial crime.

Metro Bank, the U.K. challenger bank seeking to fix a shortfall on its balance sheet, said it expects to raise about £350 ($464 million) through selling shares.

Business management software provider Sage will partner with U.K. fintech Modulr to deliver real-time salary and supplier payments to small and medium-size businesses in the country.

Lloyds is paying small merchants to offer cash back, but consumer groups are already casting the move as inadequate to address the decline of branches and ATMs in the U.K.

Immigration restrictions are a threat to London’s status as a fintech hub, enough for Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky to demand the U.K.’s government take special steps to prevent the technology talent from going elsewhere.

The all-in-one card market has been a dead end for many years, with products like Coin, Swyp, Stratos and Plastc doomed to be mere footnotes in the history of fintech. Curve is determined to avoid the same fate, and it says PSD2 is its ticket to success.

The venture capital arms of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Salesforce.com Inc. are investing in U.K. payments startup GoCardless, which has has raised an additional $75 million to fund expansion.

While payments firms must navigate political and regulatory waters, consumers and merchants are best served by a competitive free market free of politics, with minimalist regulators playing the role of the night watchman, writes Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

Ant Financial, the Chinese payments company that operates Alipay, has a scale that’s almost unimaginable to a U.S. audience. But the giant's ability to build a true empire has already run into regulatory trouble in the U.S.—and it’s affecting Ant's strategy worldwide.

London-based TrueLayer says its API is a cheaper, faster and more secure way to make online payments than using credit cards or manually-entered bank transfers.

It’s unusual for a seemingly healthy company’s website to implore its U.S. customers to seek out a competitor with less than a month's notice, but cross-border payment processor WorldFirst has done just that.

Payments providers PXP Solutions and Kalixa have merged to form PXP Financial, a London-based company focused on delivering omnichannel services to merchant acquirers.

Nordea Finance will license Divido’s white-label point of sale lending platform for launch to retailers across several Nordic countries.

Peru is planning a real-time payment system with Vocalink that will put the country on par with similar systems in Thailand, Singapore, the U.S. and the U.K.