Payment processing

The speed of technological change is forcing Britain’s retail payments authority Pay.UK to redesign its core infrastructure.

The Fed should continue to play a key role in the new payments system, rather than leaving it in the hands of the country’s largest banks, Thomas Hoenig and Bruce Summers argue.

Sweden-based Klarna is replacing the in-house customer authentication process it developed for its buy-now, pay-later online checkout option with a new approach to streamline merchant integration.

International payments provider Currencies Direct is offering a new online platform for batch payments to help clients making multiple payments in different currencies.

As the consumer payments technology market is becoming saturated, B2B payments have captured the attention of the investment community, writes Karla Friede, CEO of Nvoicepay.

When cutting through the noise generated by the highs and lows of cryptocurrency value, the underlying blockchain technology is poised to keep advancing toward mainstream payments.

The Silicon Valley-based fintech, which recently announced a new partnership with Walmart, plans to add hundreds of new workers this year.

With many consumers now using online and mobile banking, there is a huge opportunity to incorporate blockchain solutions into the everyday payments experience, writes Andre Stoorvogel, director of product marketing for Rambus Payments.

FIS’s $43 billion agreement to acquire Worldpay and Fiserv’s $22 billion deal to buy First Data are largely closing the gaps between financial technology and merchant acquiring. But these mergers are only the first of many steps.

Existing bank systems are holding issuers back from responding fast enough to changing market conditions, contends Mikko Rieger, senior vice president of consumer management services for Nets.

Banks of all sizes need to stick together to ward off threats from "unregulated" fintechs and other nonbanks, Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan said Tuesday.

As the faster-payments movement gradually increases the speed of transfers, the use cases for immediate debit push payments are becoming more specialized.

Randal Quarles, a senior Fed official and chair of the Financial Stability Board, sparked debate with a speech about the risks and rewards of companies like Amazon, Facebook and Apple entering the financial system.

The FIS-Worldpay and Fiserv-First Data combos do provide notable scale, but the even-larger companies still won't produce the same pace of growth that younger nimble fintechs enjoy, says Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

Restaurant point of sale and back-office management provider Toast raised $250 million in a Series E funding round, valuing the company at $2.7 billion, and is adding David Yuan from TCV to its board of directors.

While banks are oftentimes simply too big to react to this consumer change quickly, more agile fintechs have been much faster to prioritize mobile-first POS financing, argues Nufar Segal, general manager of consumer financing at Jifiti.

By learning from the struggles that resulted from Wells Fargo’s outages, the rest of the financial world can improve its own disaster recovery plans, writes Todd Matters, chief architect and co-founder of RackWare.

The Clearing House announced moves to attract community banks and credit unions to its real-time payments system. Smaller depositories have generally been reluctant to sign up with what is seen as a large-bank effort.

Seeking a way to help its employed shoppers manage their money, the Instacart grocery payments and delivery service is partnering with e-commerce payments provider Stripe to offer an Instant Cashout option.

As more national banks leave smaller communities and focus on large customers, fintechs are creating an "Uber effect" with an easier experience. Small businesses are increasingly looking to borrow money and fund their growth initiatives, and need a partner who can deliver, argues William Phelan, president of PayNet.