U.S.

Paysafe is buying iPayment Holdings, a processor with a similar focus in the U.S.

Checkout.com has used alternative fees and a high-touch approach to build a market for its online payments toolkit in Europe. Now it's come to the U.S., where the likes of Stripe and Braintree already own a sizable chunk of the market.

Some of the biggest digital wallets in the world — including Alipay and WeChat Pay — succeed because they have very little in common with other big-brand wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

Elizabeth Rossiello heard that cryptocurrencies would be the next big thing so she founded BitPesa. And while she benefited from the initial craze around bitcoin and blockchain, her company also shares bitcoin's reputational wounds.

President Trump's isolationism is colliding head-on with a lucrative trend of Chinese tourists coming to the U.S. looking — and payments companies are caught in the crossfire.

PSD2's open banking wave is attracting lots of attention from payments technology firms, and Zafin is making moves to cement its place in the market.

For the U.S., being late to the real-time payments game has some tactical advantages, namely the ability to learn from other countries' successes and failures.

China's declaration on Wednesday that its payments market is now open to foreign companies gives Chinese payments processors an opportunity to grow globally — but it's made similar moves before, with little effect.

Alipay has partnered with FreedomPay and expanded an existing deal with First Data to deepen U.S. merchant acceptance at key destinations for Chinese tourists.

A motivating speech from a female executive at the Ogilvy ad agency 15 years ago helped steer Denise Pickett to new heights at American Express. As did having a family willing to move to the U.S. from Canada.