Mastercard

Competition between hundreds of national and global payment systems forces everybody to continually adapt, up their games, culling weaker and underperforming systems and inviting the search for better mouse traps, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

The bank raised its return-on-equity goals, based mostly on cost cuts and its core trading business; the Fed did raise the rate it pays on bank reserves.

The card networks' single "click to pay" button — an implementation of Secure Remote Commerce — is drawing some negative attention from merchant groups and independent networks that see it as a way to steal volume from alternative payment providers.

Progress in the trade war is welcome news for Mastercard’s ambitions in China, though the coronavirus jeopardizes the rosy outlook.

Mastercard will financially back Indian merchant commerce platform Pine Labs' embrace of multi-channel installment financing as a payment option in addition to cards.

The payments industry is a hotbed of innovation, and many of its larger players are eager to claim patents on new developments.

The city would join San Francisco and Philadelphia among cities that prohibit stores and restaurants from only accepting electronic payments.

Even in mature markets, consumers may not feel very connected to their payment cards. This is making issuers more reliant on selling data-driven experiences over simple transaction processing.

Marqeta has been certified as a European card processor with Mastercard to help digital banks issue cards more quickly, signing Twisto as the first customer of the collaboration.

The fintech community was both surprised and energized by recent news that Visa has agreed to acquire Plaid, one of the nation’s largest fintech platforms for financial data analytics.

The acquisition will vastly expand Visa's platform, giving it nearly Amazon-like influence.

Mastercard is partnering with issuer processor EML and technology startup CleverCards to allow any business to send digital Mastercard payment cards directly to an employee’s or customer’s mobile wallet by SMS/text, email or any messaging app such as WhatsApp.

The purchase price is double the fintech's valuation in a 2018 funding round.

Mastercard has appointed Raj Seshadri as president of its data and services organization, succeeding Kevin Stanton, who starts a new role as chief transformation officer.

Though many merchants remain wary of alienating their customers with fees, others now see an opportunity to recoup the growing costs associated with accepting plastic.

2019 kicked off with a series of large, multibillion-dollar acquisitions that promised to forever change the landscape of the payments industry. And while those big deals were clustered at the start of the year, many other pivotal deals took place over the course of the year.

Royal Bank of Scotland and Mastercard are targeting value-added merchant services with a £60 million investment in London-based Pollinate Networks.

The U.S. District Court in New York has issued final approval of an estimated $6.2 billion settlement in the merchants' class-action lawsuit over swipe fees, a 15-year-long case against Visa and Mastercard. But the struggle between merchants and the card brands doesn't end here.

Mastercard is working to build its risk-monitoring arsenal by buying RiskRecon, which offers tools measuring threats introduced by third parties, including vendors.

The bank is working with a Swedish fintech to offer a tool that lets account holders track how their spending choices might be contributing to climate change. The tool may never be a big moneymaker, but it could help the San Francisco bank attract customers and recruit employees.