Visa

Amid the global explosion of e-commerce and demand for digital money transfers, Visa is acquiring YellowPepper to help drive tokenization and real-time payments in Latin America.

Visa’s $5.3 billion acquisition of Plaid has raised competition concerns at the U.S. Justice Department, which is nearing a decision about whether to sue to block the deal, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Click to Pay is based on EMVCo’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) industry standard, acting as a form of guest checkout which alleviates the need for cardholders to manually enter personal and account information to shop at unfamiliar merchants.

As merchants and consumers increasingly favor contactless payments over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Visa is removing obstacles to contactless acceptance.

Alipay’s assembling a portfolio to stitch together a multinational financial services ecosystem. The mobile payments titan’s IPO will provide an enormous war chest to develop new services, turbocharge international expansion, and fund acquisitions, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

MagicCube’s i-Accept is a hardware-free option for accepting card and electronic payments that could appeal to cost-conscious small businesses and open up a new market for banks that provide them payments services.

Visa on Monday made an investment in Global Processing Services, which powers the payment rails for several challenger banks and fintechs. It's similar to a January investment Mastercard made in Marqeta, an open API card issuing and processing platform.

Facebook's size and aggressive moves into mobile wallets and stablecoins pose a formidable threat to other big technology companies and traditional payment networks, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

Since July, Visa has noticed an uptick in unemployment insurance fraud with prepaid cards being used as a key disbursement vehicle. And the best solution may be rooted in technology, not law enforcement.

American Express is expanding into the fast-growing European market for open banking-based payment initiation services with its Pay with Bank transfer platform.