Payment processing

In launching a new international account for its business clients, Starling Bank is converting the bank's debit card to support payments in either pounds or euros.

The grocery giant reportedly has reversed its decision to bar Visa credit cards in its stores, demonstrating the limited effect of merchant bans in battling the payment networks.

Anticipating demand from internet of things and advanced smartphones, Fingerprint Cards AB has launched a new multi-biometric technology platform that combines iris screening with facial recognition.

While the impact of the U.K.’s endemic late payments culture has captured the headlines over the past couple of years, there is arguably an even bigger problem afflicting the country’s merchant population — the threat of not being paid at all.

As the number of payment types and channels increase, manual processes to handle fraud can rapidly become unmanageable, says The ai Corporation's Oliver Tearle.

Many small banks remain skeptical of the payments network because it is owned and operated by big banks and they are waiting for the Federal Reserve to launch a rival service.

Congress should get behind the Fed's effort to launch a real-time payments service instead of getting in its way.

Nobody will be keen to go toe-to-toe with the Fed, which is the financial systems’ paramount regulator and central bank with virtually unlimited resources, says Intrepid Ventures' Eric Grover.

The bank says the deal will appeal to millennials' preference for installment loans over credit cards and let consumers get an early upgrade to the next Xbox coming out next year.

Uber launched a series of financial services to provide real-time wage payments and enhanced account features in a single app, seemingly putting Uber in the role of a digital bank.

With data collection, just because you can doesn’t always mean you should, says Equiniti's Sarah Jackson.

Regulatory bodies are making modifications to disclosure requirements with greater frequency, requiring issuers to spend time and money to make updates across what is often a complex mixture of products, communications and channels, says Messagepoint's Fred Harding.

Western Union has gone live with a service enabling real-time cross-border remittances to India harnessing Unified Payments Interface, the central bank’s payment rails.

Harking back to the controversial practices of Bitcoin’s initial users, Tether is gaining traction among merchants that may have trouble getting credit-card processing services, or are charged high card processing fees: adult and online gambling sites, and vaping and cannabis shops.

Leveraging new technology and APIs, Fiserv has rolled out CheckFree Next, a major update of the core CheckFree bill payment technology Fiserv acquired in 2007.

As requirements change, open standards can help governments feel confident that solutions are agnostic, flexible and safe from vendor lock-in, says the OSPT Alliance's Luiz Guimaraes.

The real opportunity to achieve financial empowerment lies with the companies that are most intimately connected to people's lives, says Rapyd's Eric Rosenthal.

Our industry should work toward making cash easy to use in a digital environment with digital financial services at point of sale, gradually winning over cash users to our shared all-digital payment cause.

Congress should get behind the Fed's effort to launch a real-time payments service instead of getting in its way.

Payments innovation is happening in small businesses like Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant, which has to manage a shift in how people shop, order, pay and communicate — all at the same time.