U.K.

The U.K.’s Rural Payments Agency has long been renowned for its inefficiencies in processing timely and accurate financial support payments to farmers across the country. But now industry figures expect Brexit will lead to an improvement in performance due to a loosening of the EU-driven bureaucratic regulations.

A new malicious spam campaign that has been targeting Internet users in the U.K. serves as an important example of how banking malware targets business as well as home users.

The GDPR doesn’t mandate how data requests should be made, but it does say that organizations handling personal data should be prepared to handle the requests. One would be right to wonder whether companies are as prepared as they should be.

This week's ruling from a U.K. appeals court is the latest of many episodes in a battle between merchants and card brands that has influenced regulations, technology, market strategies and nearly all other aspects of the payments ecosystem.

JPMorgan Chase, which employs about 10,000 people in London, has asked "several dozen" employees to relocate across the European Union before the U.K. formally leaves the bloc in March next year.

A British appeals court ruled in favor of retailers including J Sainsbury Plc in a blow to credit card firms that could now face billions of pounds in damages.

Barclays has introduced an SMB credit card with a very targeted perk: It extends the interest-free credit periods up to 116 days for payments made at popular trade retailers Travis Perkins and Toolstation.

E-invoicing is the solution to unlock early-payment discounts, but many businesses are stuck in the past, according to Roger Hatfield, vice president of North America for CloudTrade.

Ticket sales company Ticketmaster has warned customers in the U.K. that malicious code running on its website could have led to personal data and payment details being stolen. This kind of breach through third-party JavaScript code is quite common and may go undetected for months.

Gromit Unleashed 2 will be incorporating contactless donation points along the art trail to aid the Bristol Children’s Hospital — a project that is as much a necessity as it is an innovation in the U.K.'s aggressively contactless environment.

South Asian remittance firm InstaReM has launched its cross-border P2P and B2B digital money transfer service in the U.K. and the EU as it prepares for an IPO in 2021. It also expects to become profitable by then.

While Europe is still making sense of an international Visa outage in early June, fintech disruptor TransferWise experienced its own outage that lasted up to 11 hours on Thursday, with website, app and card payments unavailable to the company’s 1 million-plus users.

Malware operators are joining forces, installing each others’ tools on compromised computers to target a wider range of victims, and possibly also sharing the work of harvesting funds using stolen account details.

U.K.-based fintech Revolut has entered the Russian payments market through a partnership with Russian payments firm Qiwi, and announced plans to apply for a U.S. banking license.

Exchanges aren’t very transparent about their methods, but that in fact most handle such internal transactions exactly how regular banks have worked for centuries.

U.K. payments technology provider Paysafe has entered a partnership with Company.com and Ingo Money to offer same-day settlement to small business merchants in the U.S.

Paysafe Group has introduced a cash-based online payment mechanism for people who don’t have bank accounts or don’t use cards online due to security concerns. The U.K.-based payments services provider is also expanding its presence in the U.S.

Visa, which was criticized for its vague explanation of a June 1 outage in Europe, was in the process of installing better technology, but the project was not complete at the time of the incident and won't be finished until the end of this year.

The idea of an email scam may bring to mind the clumsy phishing cons from the early days of online banking, but the tactic's latest incarnation is a bigger threat than ever.

U.K. private equity firm Dunedin says it has invested "a significant stake" in a £44 million (U.S. $58 million) funding round for Global Processing Services, which provides payment processing and technology for financial institutions, digital banks, challenger banks and fintechs.