U.K.

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.

Global politics are dividing the world of e-commerce, forcing companies to make tough decisions about their strategies for the U.S., India and other regions.

Featurespace wants to expand its fraud-fighting tool beyond its core audience of banks and payment processors to cover transactions across a broader industry spectrum including retail, gaming and insurance.

Visa CEO Alfred Kelly said the company's earnings, though solid, could suffer if if politicians in Washington and London don’t resolve their biggest issues.

EU states such as Belgium, Lithuania and Ireland are offering e-money institution, payments institution or banking licenses to fintechs, which can be passported across Europe, in anticipation of the U.K. losing its ability to do so after Brexit. But there is no cross-border deposit protection for European consumers holding accounts at EU banks with passported licenses.

Digital banking and payments provider PrePay Solutions is partnering with PayQuicker to help with currency conversions in payroll management programs globally, and to expand PayQuicker's capabilities for its clients' international workers.

Ten weeks remain until Great Britain is set to leave the European Union, but the chaos of the entire Brexit process brought much of the British credit union industry's regulatory priorities to a halt.

British payments technology company Moorwand is offering the first UnionPay prepaid cards in the U.K. on its UPayCard branded prepaid platform, with a larger roll-out planned for consumers and corporations during the first quarter of 2019.

U.K.-based Nuggets is integrating its blockchain technology to existing payment rails, creating a system wherein merchants will no longer have to access or store consumers' personal data.