U.K.

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.

While the gig economy has become more prevalent in recent years, the traditional banking market has provided few innovations for tackling the various payment-related challenges faced by businesses which utilise these workers.

London-based Vegannection has launched a prepaid card for vegans that’s accepted only at merchants that pass its standards test.

Samsung is exploring the development of a smartphone-based cryptocurrency wallet, according to a recent patent application the electronics giant filed in the U.K.

U.K. credit card spending rose an annual 7.5 percent in November, as consumers increasingly prefer to spend on plastic, according to UK Finance.

Visa has a deal to acquire the London-based bank payments provider Earthport for 198 million pounds ($250.6 million U.S.), pending approval from Earthport's shareholders.

China's Ant Financial, the Alibaba payments affiliate that operates Alipay, is reportedly in the advanced stages of talks to buy WorldFirst, an international payments provider based in London.

Mastercard and white label payment software company Cardstream are partnering to accelerate the deployment of Mastercard’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC)-ready Masterpass wallet and its “Pay by Bank” solution.

With Brexit on the horizon, the volatility of the U.K. financial market has created an increased demand for more flexible financing among small and medium-sized enterprises. But a decade on from the 2008 financial crisis, the loans available for SMEs are still restricted by regulations on the total amount of capital that banks must hold.

The Bank of England is upgrading the U.K.’s Real-Time Gross Settlement system. Separately, the U.K. payments authority is developing a New Payments Architecture that will upgrade Britain’s Faster Payments real-time retail system.

Credit card fraud is on the rise in the U.K. with more than $2 billion being stolen from credit and debit cards over the past twelve months, an increase of 38% on the previous year. But while large scale data breaches have been heavily blamed for this surge in crime, ex-fraudster Tony Sales says one of the most pertinent reasons is a persistent lack of understanding within the financial industry of how criminals operate.