Visa

Large card issuers began banning cryptocurrency purchases on their cards in February. But fintechs are allowing consumers to purchase and invest in digital currencies, and they say the risk is minimal.

Mastercard has become the latest major card network to suffer a high profile crash. With its Thursday incident coming hard on the heels of Visa’s crash last month many experts wonder if blockchain technology could prevent future card network outages.

About a month after Visa's European outage, Mastercard encountered a similar glitch for a brief period of time on Thursday.

Citigroup and Mastercard replace Barclays and Visa as the card partners for the Maine apparel retailer.

This week's ruling from a U.K. appeals court is the latest of many episodes in a battle between merchants and card brands that has influenced regulations, technology, market strategies and nearly all other aspects of the payments ecosystem.

A British appeals court ruled in favor of retailers including J Sainsbury Plc in a blow to credit card firms that could now face billions of pounds in damages.

Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. are getting close to settling a 13-year-old lawsuit over fees charged when merchants accept card payments, according to a person familiar with the agreement.

American Express prevailed Monday in an eight-year antitrust battle with the government. Here’s a look at how other card networks, banks, retailers and consumers will be affected.

While Europe is still making sense of an international Visa outage in early June, fintech disruptor TransferWise experienced its own outage that lasted up to 11 hours on Thursday, with website, app and card payments unavailable to the company’s 1 million-plus users.

NovoPayment, a payment provider focused on Latin America, is working with Visa to help local banks work with Latin American businesses to migrate from their high levels of cash usage to digital payments.

Jelena McWilliams said the agency will ask banks what's working and what's not; the acquisition of Hyperwallet Systems lets PayPal offer more services.

Visa, which was criticized for its vague explanation of a June 1 outage in Europe, was in the process of installing better technology, but the project was not complete at the time of the incident and won't be finished until the end of this year.

Visa has moved to cut its debit transaction fees in India by 95%, bringing it more in line with RuPay, India’s state-run domestic debit scheme.

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.