Mastercard

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. agreed to pay as much as $6.2 billion to end a long-running price-fixing case brought by merchants over card fees, the largest-ever class action settlement of an antitrust case.

Each major disaster is a real-world testing ground for payments technology, but it can also be a stark reminder of the limits of these advancements.

The payments company released a platform made up of nine B2B networks and powered by Microsoft’s Azure.

Technology developers have little choice but to see big data deals like Mastercard’s reported collaboration with Google as an opportunity for deep, actionable analysis, setting aside the chilling effect of privacy concerns and a consumer buy in.

While the card networks have greatly benefited by the global boom in e-commerce, they are confronted with the corresponding growth in digital advertising. This will increasingly lead them to seek out data-sharing deals like Mastercard's reported arrangement with Google, which could prove vital to the networks' future survival.

The deal lets Google learn more about what people buy based on online ads, but raises privacy concerns; checkbooks favor Congressman Sean Maloney.

As the pressure to monetize data in an omnichannel environment increases, so does the fear of misuse.

For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for.

KeyBank will deploy Mastercard's advanced transaction decisioning technology, boosting the card network's push into artificial intelligence-powered authorization.

Debit push payments proved an essential component of the ride-sharing boom, with many drivers opting to pay a fee for immediate funds throughout the day to cover fuel and other expenses. And the technology is finding fans in other niches as well.