Merchant

Payments processor Shift4 Payments has acquired three point of sale companies that it will integrate to strengthen its presence in the hospitality POS market.

As billions of devices interact in trillions of transactions, autonomous payments will be required because there simply won’t be enough humans on earth to look at them all, writes Vaughan Emery, founder and CEO of Atonomi.

"Ring-fencing" is designed to reduce risk, but will lead to major changes in transaction infrastructure and open a temporary door for fraudsters, according to Marcus Hughes, head of strategic business development at Bottomline Technologies.

Patriot National in Connecticut would become the latest community bank to ramp up small-business lending with its $81 million deal to acquire Hana Financial's much larger SBA lending unit.

The results suggest that even as financial institutions implement more sophisticated fraud-mitigation techniques, they have not been keeping pace with criminals.

Its small, locally owned banks were as decimated after the crisis as in any big city. But community bankers say changes to the economy and their lending practices offer them a shot at challenging the big banks that dominate their market.

Putting money directly in people’s pockets requires more speed and efficiency through innovative technologies and payments systems, writes Deirdre Ives, managing director of Wirecard North America.

It is unclear whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is abandoning its supervisory oversight of Equifax or just taking a back seat to the Federal Trade Commission as the latter investigates the credit bureau.

Credit standards for commercial loans to medium and large firms showed some signs of easing over the last three months of 2017, even though demand stayed relatively unchanged.

Parents with children on youth sports teams have a lot to keep track of, not the least of which is payments for the fees associated with competitions.