Merchant

People with scores below 500 are often in communities that suffer the most from economic hardship and violence. Banks and regulators can do more to qualify them for financing, ultimately creating healthier local economies.

Lenders should be prepared to act quickly and decisively, leveraging the power of technology, innovative lending approaches, low interest rates and renewed commitment to small business funding, says LendingFront's Jorge Sun.

Whenever a technology moves into the payments or financial data ecosystem, it alerts fraudsters to probe it more intensely — and ultimately, figure out a way to use it as an attack vector.

First Horizon, TCF and Webster are among the banks eyeing efficiency initiatives that could include more branch closings, layoffs and reduction of office space. Expect others to follow suit as low rates and tepid loan demand tied to the pandemic pressure revenue.

Lenders are worried that the Small Business Administration could use borrower responses to deny forgiveness for many Paycheck Protection Program loans that exceed $2 million.

More lenders and governments should partner with community development financial institutions to ensure aid reaches minority-owned businesses that are the backbone of many neighborhoods slammed by the coronavirus.

Moscow-based JSC Post Bank has established a merchant acquiring agreement with JCB International to allow JCB cardholders to withdraw cash from all of the bank's ATMs and make payments at Post Bank point-of-sale terminals in Russia.

Viva Wallet is offering London’s 20,000 black taxis a Mastercard-branded business debit card whose cashback is meant to be offset against card acceptance fees at the acquirer’s in-taxi terminals.

Big banks and other financial firms predict the cost of warding off cybercriminals will keep climbing in 2021 as they work to secure digital financial services popularized by the pandemic.

In the push to get millions of cash-based micro- and small-business merchants to go digital, the two largest card networks are getting a boost from contactless payments' global surge.