Cards

As the gift card market grows and becomes increasingly digital, so has the product's utility. Thus, many consumers are shifting their habits and buying gift cards for themselves either due to an incentive program or to help with budgeting.

Despite improvements in the proportion of consumers without a bank account, there is still work to do to bring more Americans into the banking system, argues FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams.

Petrol, Slovenia’s leading gas station operator, has partnered with Wirecard and Mastercard, enabling users of Petrol’s MBills mobile wallet to add a prepaid Mastercard to their accounts.

One U.K. fintech hopes its cryptocurrency-based prepaid debit card will gain traction with bitcoin and ether enthusiasts here.

Grab and Mastercard have formed a partnership extending the reach of the ride-hailing app by making a prepaid card available to Grab’s 110 million users across Southeast Asia.

Societe Generale launched a contactless biometric payment trial in France for a debit card with a built-in fingerprint reader.

Netspend customers kept from accessing paychecks; Sen. Elizabeth Warren rebukes Comerica over fraud in benefits program; FDIC poised to revamp deposit rules (about time, say banks); and more from this week's most-read stories.

Mastercard is making the first move among the card networks, again, on moving away from the signature requirement — completely removing the space for a signature from its cards.

Customer furor stemmed from troubles FIS had processing payments for MetaBank, the issuer of Netspend and other prepaid debit cards.

Twilio has secured the services of Stripe as a launch partner to enable businesses to accept payments over the phone through their existing Stripe account. The companies plan to offer Twilio Pay in early 2019.