EMEA

The U.K. government is consulting with train operators on smart pay-as-you-go ticketing. The goal is to enable consumers to travel across the U.K.’s entire railway network by tapping in and out with contactless cards or smartphones instead of paper tickets.

The U.K. prepaid gift card market is experiencing strong growth among consumers who buy them as gifts and for self-use, as well as among businesses that purchase them for customer loyalty programs and as employee incentives.

The deal between Performance Trust and Banks Street Partners is the second combination this month of investment banks that cater to commercial banks.

Direct lenders are gearing up for more business in the U.K. as they see banks shrinking their sterling corporate loan books in the wake of Brexit-linked volatility and slower economic growth.

There is a growing proliferation of social P2P technologies within the U.K. banking sector, but the market for such payments is vastly different from that in the U.S., where social payment apps have found a welcoming audience.

Credit unions clinging to an outdated name that no longer reflects the institution's current field of membership could be doing themselves more harm than good, experts say. But it's a fine line between honoring the past and preparing for tomorrow.

The FIS-Worldpay merger is the largest international payments deal to date, significantly topping the recent Fiserv-First Data merger that turned heads at the beginning of the year. But the FIS deal’s strategic implications could be more interesting than the raw numbers.

The deal will give Janney greater access to the community banking sector.

The financial services technology company FIS has agreed to buy Worldpay. The deal is valued at $43 billion and will allow FIS to counter the transaction processing scale Fiserv received when it acquired First Data this year. The merger price is based on a $34 billion bid plus $9 billion of Worldpay's debt.

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.