Cross border payments

Mastercard established a new structure for businesses focused on card acceptance and transaction processing, new payment flows and value-added services. Separately, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is joining several countries' central banks in a test of tech to support cross-border transactions.

Federal regulators need to mandate full disclosure of total costs for international money transfers, including all exchange rate markups, and to allow nonbanks access to the Fed's payment system.

Visa is working with Thunes; LemFi and Western Union to expand its reach; Swift has completed testing of 38 global digital currencies, and more.

Amazon is working with Stripe to expand its Just Walk Out retail stores in Australia and Canada; Safaricom is working with Onafriq to support remittances sent via M-Pesa to Ethiopia; and more.

Despite further delays, the country has taken two key steps to opening up access to its Real-Time Rail, including allowing payment companies to participate without a bank partner, but it has yet to commit to a date for the project to go live.

The fast-food chain is analyzing the cause of an issue that affected payments in multiple countries. Separately, dLocal, a payments processor in Uraguay, is making changes at the top.

Thomas Halpin, who heads global cash management for North America, talks about real-time processing, generative AI, central bank digital currencies and why the ISO 20022 messaging standard is cool.

The U.K. is considering a bill that would let banks and payment service providers put suspicious-looking peer-to-peer payments on hold for up to four days to conduct security reviews; Giesecke+Devrient is working with Brazil's central bank to develop an offline payment approach to a central bank digital currency; and more in global payments news this week.

Virgin Money has cut about 150 jobs and 39 branches thus far in 2024, the Central Bank of Nepal has hired ACI Worldwide to build a payment switch to enable interoperable card payments for merchants, and more.

Visa will be the payment partner for the 2026 World Cup and other events, companies in Canada are teaming up to promote open banking for credit unions, and more.

The bank's cross-border transaction service opens a new lane for customer acquisition in an increasingly competitive niche.

As innovation in other domains accelerates, the inertia plaguing our international payment systems is a critical bottleneck, stifling U.S. businesses that choose to engage in global commerce.

CaixaBank assembled a team of more than 100 people focused on generative artificial intelligence products, Ripple changed the name of RippleNet to Ripple Payments, and more.

Canada's government is preparing legislation to promote open banking development, Mastercard has gained approval to process payments in China, and more.

Ant Group's quarterly profit fell by 65%, dented by a one-time fine that signaled the end of China's yearslong crackdown on the tech industry.

The technology, which has its roots in cryptocurrency, could make corporate transactions more flexible.

NatWest is updating its chatbot, Cora, to make engagement more conversational, and Amex is working with the Canadian fintech Nuvei to promote bank-transfer payments to U.K. merchants.

There are three concrete steps policymakers and industry can pursue that will limit the damage that is being done by cutting vulnerable populations off from remittance payments.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia is examining how it can use generative artificial intelligence to simulate customers testing products, and U.S. Bancorp's Elavon unit receives a financial services license from the Bank of England.

NCR has completed the spinoff of its ATM business, Revolut doubles its number of fraud-fighters in two years, China builds a zone for digital yuan users, and more.