U.K.

After forming a series of high-profile partnerships with various payments service providers, China's UnionPay International has declared its plan to challenge Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly of the U.K. card industry.

Our annual Most Influential Women in Payments feature, now in its seventh year, highlights the women who are creating change and opportunities in the payments industry. For the first time, the editors of PaymentsSource have also recognized one woman for lifetime achievement.

When Claire Gates joined the Paysafe Group two years ago, she was determined to demonstrate to payments industry leaders that bringing fresh ideas into fintech is gender agnostic.

The past six years have been a whirlwind for King, who had no experience in the payments industry before becoming CEO of Featurespace, the fast-growing U.K. startup enabling banks to use machine-learning technology to block payment card fraud.

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.