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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.

Talking with Shari Van Cleave, head of Wells Fargo Digital Labs; Citizens Financial makes a big move in mortgages in purchasing Franklin American; a rewards blockchain could give Amex access to a wealth of customer data; and more from this week's most-read stories.

Many of these attacks have been server side ransomware and other sophisticated hacks, leading companies to examine the immature security processes, the technology of application security, and the insufficient expertise of development, writes Jeannie Warner, the security manager at WhiteHat Security.

Belgian security researcher Xavier Mertens has discovered a piece of a banking malware campaign that appears to target customers of various U.K. banks.

Hyperledger, an open-source organization focused on blockchain technology, has added 16 members.

Two major Canadian banks, Bank of Montreal and Simplii Financial, have become victims of hacks that affected some 50,000 and 40,000 customers respectively. Neither bank decided to pay the ransom by the hackers' May 28 deadline.

Billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Financial is lifting its fundraising target to more than $12 billion by bringing in existing Chinese shareholders in a yuan-denominated financing round, people familiar with the matter said.

The credit card issuer has built a distributed ledger through which merchants create their own membership rewards and get access to detailed information on purchases and the success of promotions.

We need to rethink how we acquire and manage consumer data, and any business using enterprise software needs to be accountable for how information is being processed, transported or shared, writes Chris Wong, CEO of LifeSite.

The authentication software and hardware provider is shifting its focus to identity verification and account onboarding, another sign that the newest generation of bank customers is not interested in coming into a branch to set up an account.