Payment processing

The simplified pricing of fintechs like Square and Stripe has finally caught up with banks' more complex fees, prompting Wells Fargo to restructure its billing for small businesses. Other banks will also face consequences—particularly community banks that depend on local merchants.

Above all, open banking helps financial institutions improve the user experience, increasing customer satisfaction and addressing consumer needs, writes Aurimas Adomavicius, president and co-founder of Devbridge Group.

Protecting customer data should have always been a priority for companies. With GDPR, they now have a framework for teams across the organization to adopt and protect their customer data, writes Shanthala Balagopal, a product marketing executive at Helpshift.

Merchants that want to use technology to boost sales can establish in-house systems labs to test new payment technology and apps, or find an external lab to do so.

Beem It, a startup owned by three of Australia’s largest banks, has launched a free real-time social payments app designed to run on older debit networks instead of the country's new faster payments platform.

With increasing numbers of alternative providers gaining licenses to provide payment services aimed specifically at businesses, Beck predicts the pressure on the banks to offer faster and cheaper services is going to substantially increase.

TSYS has purchased iMobile3, a maker of private-label payment solutions for small businesses, to beef up merchants' capabilities through the point of sale.

Retailer associations and debit network providers have formed the Secure Payments Partnership, designed to address the ongoing problem of payment fraud.

Mastercard is working with Starling Bank as its strategic partner to settle funds sent within the U.K. through its Mastercard Send service.

Visa's management faces an unwelcome choice: It can share more information about internal shortcomings or mistakes that caused payments to shut off temporarily, or get summoned to Parliament for a politically-infused public questioning.

Interaction with the provider, or extra hand-holding, is becoming less common in an advancing digital payments age for e-retailers.

Students and their families are often not aware of how complicated the cross-border tuition process can be until they’re in the process, writes Steve Villegas, vice president of partner management for PPRO's U.S. headquarters.

Banks are making business customers happy with new digital billing services as machine learning meets the lockbox.

One thing is clear: This outage, however brief, undermines the card networks' ability to market themselves as the fundamental platforms for a new era of payments technology.

Incumbent bank wires and checks, for example, carry slow settlement times and poor exchanges rates, while some newer fintech alternatives lack the interoperability with one another to scale and sometimes prioritize speed over security, writes Peter Shore, general manager of Transpay

Marqeta Inc. may never be a household name, but its behind-the-scenes payments services have attracted plenty of attention. The fintech startup announced Tuesday that it is raising $45 million from investors including Iconiq Capital, the family office with investors including Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s investment bank.

What advantages will this new system bring to the U.K. payments market? The U.K. has traditionally struggled to find ways to break the major banks’ monopoly on payments.

Fintechs are entering the market to close the time gap in gig economy payments between businesses and consumers. This will fundamentally change business models for banks, according to Lauren Reuf, a research analyst at Nvoicepay.

Merchants, banks, fintechs and card networks may crave digital payments' treasure trove of data over cash's simple anonymity, but any weakness in a centralized ecosystem threatens the entire network, as Visa learned late last week.

For some, the fast pace of change in payments technology needs to slow down for consumers and merchants to catch up. For others, the technology must evolve because it is the consumer and merchant seeking change — all in the name of an easier, mobile experience.