Mastercard

After 20 years of working with a clunky, time-consuming 3-D Secure authorization method for online purchases, the wheels are finally in motion to get the upgraded 2.0 version in place for merchants and banks, granting access to more data for spotting fraud.

The U.S. companies agreed to reduce the average annual interchange rate in Canada by 10 basis points to 1.4 percent on cardThe new rate takes effect in 2020 and runs for five years. The government estimated that small and medium-sized businesses could save C$25,000 over the period.

Mastercard's strong performance is dampened by threats from trade disputes and Brexit, both of which could cause the company pain in the future.

Maybe it's coincidence, or maybe it's progress — in recent weeks, a number of large payment networks have suffered brief but widespread outages, particularly in Europe.

Mastercard and Worldpay are embarking on a strong push to promote Mastercard's Pay by Bank system, which will likely face a deluge of competition under the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which took effect this year.

Digital payments are becoming a critical aspect of nearly every new service for merchants or financial institutions.

Large card issuers began banning cryptocurrency purchases on their cards in February. But fintechs are allowing consumers to purchase and invest in digital currencies, and they say the risk is minimal.

Worldpay and Mastercard have formed a global strategic partnership, expanding the ways consumers and merchants connect for online and in-app payments via Mastercard’s Vocalink business.

Mastercard has become the latest major card network to suffer a high profile crash. With its Thursday incident coming hard on the heels of Visa’s crash last month many experts wonder if blockchain technology could prevent future card network outages.

About a month after Visa's European outage, Mastercard encountered a similar glitch for a brief period of time on Thursday.