Visa

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 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.

The regulators plan to drop the 3% limit on bank investments in venture capital funds; Visa invests in another fintech startup.

Visa, along with Google Ventures, invested in an $80 million Series E fundraising round in cross-border B2B payments provider Currencycloud.

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

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.

Truist emphasizes high-touch, high-tech focus with new logo; Wells Fargo loses another patent lawsuit to USAA; what the Visa-Plaid merger means for banks, fintechs; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Data security and infrastructure custodian Very Good Security (VGS) received a strategic investment from Visa, which has been spending heavily this week on fintech.

Visa's deal to acquire the data aggregator Plaid is likely to have ripple effects throughout the industry, including reduced tension between banks and fintechs over data sharing.

Plaid may be a more problematic acquisition than Visa made it out to be. But without Visa, those problems were likely to get a lot worse.