Visa

After forming a series of high-profile partnerships with various payments service providers, China's UnionPay International has declared its plan to challenge Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly of the U.K. card industry.

Two years ago, Ellen Richey became Visa's vice chairman and chief risk officer, propelled to this role by over a decade of work that fundamentally changed how the average consumer makes a payment. Richey plans to retire this summer, ending a 40-year career in law and risk management.

Understanding how the payments ecosystem works is a basic tenet for anyone aspiring to work in the industry. Visa's Taira Hall has that understanding, plus she is ingrained with a trait many others may not have — she has experienced what happens when there is no accessible payments system in place.

Apps that let people access their pay on demand have become wildly popular. Do they solve a problem, or are they Band-Aids?

Mastercard has dropped out of a recent bidding war with Visa to acquire Earthport, announcing it will instead buy Transfast, a different cross-border payments firm.

The Bank of England is requiring Visa to appoint PwC as an independent third party to review the card brand’s progress in implementing recommendations that followed a 2018 outage in Europe.

In a new, global twist to its ongoing Visa Everywhere competition, Visa is targeting female entrepreneurs who are looking for the right technology to solve their payment-related business problems.

Even as Uber drivers and other gig-economy workers gained the ability to be paid every couple of hours through debit push payments, other workers still had to wait for a batched paycheck.

The move by Kroger Co. comes in response to rising interchange fees on Visa's premium credit cards. The cards will be banned at 142 Smith's stores in the western U.S.

Visa and Mastercard plan to raise interchange while battles over those rates and other levies such as merchant surcharging rage on, setting the stage for extra merchant expense, consumer costs and even more squabbling.