Visa

Visa Canada is collaborating with Finn AI to develop natural language chatbot technology to address common needs experienced by credit cardholders.

The mobile app's popularity was joined at the hip with Starbucks gift cards and loyalty points, a formula that has traditionally been known to work well at other retailers through plastic cards.

Two factions that have taken on the card networks on separate fronts are combining their might in the latest effort to pressure Visa and Mastercard. Even so, there is not a lot of reason for the credit card brands to change their methods.

Only the collective efforts of cardholders, issuers, merchants and acquirers will significantly impact payment fraud, writes Stephanie Ericksen, vice president of identity and risk products for Visa.

While the 'buy button' is designed to benefit merchants, issuers and the card networks alike, merchants may not be willing to risk any tradeoff in their access to customer data.

One thing is clear: This outage, however brief, undermines the card networks' ability to market themselves as the fundamental platforms for a new era of payments technology.

Merchants, banks, fintechs and card networks may crave digital payments' treasure trove of data over cash's simple anonymity, but any weakness in a centralized ecosystem threatens the entire network, as Visa learned late last week.

Supermarkets and other retailers reported rejected transactions after a network glitch, causing some to quickly deploy cash-only checkouts.

Visa has put its marketing and advertising featuring actor Morgan Freeman on hold following allegations of inappropriate behavior.

YellowPepper's strategic investment from Visa as part of a $12.5 million Series D funding round gives the company a chance to expand beyond its focus on Latin America and into new markets such as Europe and Asia.