Compliance

The president's executive order reflects a lack of trust in the identity information shared between countries. In theory, blockchains are tailor-made to solve this problem, but current systems may not be up to the task.

To date, Ant's Alipay has been comparable to PayPal, seldom venturing beyond payments. The financial products Alipay plans to pursue as it enters new markets put it more firmly in direct competition with mainstream banks.

Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga was among the financial services, payment and technology executives to express worry or opposition to President Trump's travel ban for certain Middle Eastern countries.

The CFPB several years ago announced plans to introduce formal rules for prepaid cards. Issuers were optimistic, but when the agency finally published its rules, they exceeded 1,600 pages and contained some surprises.

Congress has proposed repealing the Durbin Amendment, a move that would be costly to small businesses which have benefited from the reform.

The long-running feud between banks and fintech companies over screen scraping is morphing into a more nuanced and important conversation about how to exchange consumers' financial data securely and fairly.

Recommendations for a framework to develop a "universal security baseline" to protect sensitive payment data at rest and in transit remains a key goal of the Federal Reserve faster payments initiative.

Big banks increasingly are developing application programming interfaces to make their customers’ data available to third parties. But discrete deals between banks and third parties would be a bad outcome for consumers and the industry as a whole.

The U.S.-to-China payments corridor is one of the biggest in the world, according to the most recent World Bank data. It is dwarfed only by the U.S.-to-Mexico corridor, which the Trump campaign targeted as part of its border wall plan.

Facebook now lets users log in using a physical token. If banks gave consumers this option, it would strengthen the security of online accounts — or at least bolster their image.