U.K.

Contactless transit fare systems are drawing lots of investment despite several false starts in the U.S. But new numbers out of London show there are clear and multiple benefits if the infrastructure can catch up.

The speed of technological change is forcing Britain’s retail payments authority Pay.UK to redesign its core infrastructure.

International payments provider Currencies Direct is offering a new online platform for batch payments to help clients making multiple payments in different currencies.

Visa’s proposal to buy Earthport — which already survived a brief bidding war with Mastercard — is getting a closer look by the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog group.

The U.K. government is consulting with train operators on smart pay-as-you-go ticketing. The goal is to enable consumers to travel across the U.K.’s entire railway network by tapping in and out with contactless cards or smartphones instead of paper tickets.

The U.K. prepaid gift card market is experiencing strong growth among consumers who buy them as gifts and for self-use, as well as among businesses that purchase them for customer loyalty programs and as employee incentives.

Direct lenders are gearing up for more business in the U.K. as they see banks shrinking their sterling corporate loan books in the wake of Brexit-linked volatility and slower economic growth.

There is a growing proliferation of social P2P technologies within the U.K. banking sector, but the market for such payments is vastly different from that in the U.S., where social payment apps have found a welcoming audience.

The FIS-Worldpay merger is the largest international payments deal to date, significantly topping the recent Fiserv-First Data merger that turned heads at the beginning of the year. But the FIS deal’s strategic implications could be more interesting than the raw numbers.

The financial services technology company FIS has agreed to buy Worldpay. The deal is valued at $43 billion and will allow FIS to counter the transaction processing scale Fiserv received when it acquired First Data this year. The merger price is based on a $34 billion bid plus $9 billion of Worldpay's debt.