Payment processing

The blockchain has the potential to disrupt any industry sector, leaving in its wake a more effective system where people get to own the value they create, says PayStand's Jeremy Almond.

Ahead of the busiest shopping period of the year, CaixaBank is embracing facial recognition retail payments, an option that has met with pushback elsewhere.

The central bank originally predicted FedNow's launch within five years, but the Fed chairman told House lawmakers that he expects it will happen sooner.

China dominates the business. Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency could help alter the balance of power.

For decades card networks and issuers outside of China have tried to enter the giant Chinese consumer payments markets, but mostly have run into walls because of shifting regulations.

Payroll processing provides the same kinds of efficiencies that can streamline procure-to-pay systems, says Nvoicepay's Jim Wright.

EML has agreed to pay £226 million (US$290 million) to acquire Prepaid Financial Services, one of Europe’s largest e-money issuers.

Adyen has traditionally focused on streamlining card acceptance, processing and settlement for online payments, and now it wants control more of the merchant relationship by enabling merchants to issue virtual and physical payment cards.

With a growing number of banks adopting digital technology to move B2B commercial cards into mobile wallets, JPMorgan is collaborating with Boost Payment Solutions to automate the delivery of single-use and commercial card accounts to clients.

Over the past several years, well-established companies in the space like Klarna and FIS have become big enough to buy competitors, fueling the majority of the M&A we’ve seen of late, says AvidXchange's Michael Praeger.

Visa has purchased a minority stake in Nigerian payment processor Interswitch, giving the card brand deeper access to nearly two dozen nations on the continent.

Multichannel payment technology provider Ingenico Group is partnering with Singapore fintech Pundi X to deliver a point-of-sale terminal that can accept crypto payments.

If measuring PCI-DSS compliance was like tracking an athletic team's progress, one could say it was in a bad slump.

If cryptocurrency is going to meaningfully disrupt international payments and trade finance, then it must integrate with the international trade process in a relatively frictionless way, says Stasis' Gregory Klumov.

The challenge is to digitize digital currency rewards in such a way where a retailer could issue its own token, and that token could be used at a multitude of retailers, says cryptocurrency lawyer Felix Shipkevich.

China dominates the business. Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency could help alter the balance of power.

Faster and real-time payments are finding more and more use cases, but the razor-thin transaction windows are alluring to fraudsters who want to make a swift getaway with stolen funds.

The lack of coordination may be due to functional and cultural differences, or the effect of technology silos, says Nvoicepay's Josh Cyphers.

If the Fed's new service doesn't effectively prevent existing types of fraud, we might even see fraud increase thanks to the instant payments concept, says Chargeback 911's Monica Eaton-Cardone.

Isolationist politics are creeping closer to the payments industry, with European banks threatening to build a localized payment ecosystem to push back against the major American card brands.