Payment processing

Part of the coronavirus’s economic story is the sudden boom in installment payment services — a sure sign of consumers and merchants wanting a haven from revolving debt. But the rush to simpler credit is also a reflection of how the crisis has changed the way people are living and managing their lives.

The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.

The “Just walk out” technology Amazon Go stores introduced a few years ago was revolutionary for shopping and payments, but it’s a model most supermarkets can’t easily copy, according to NCR.

Wirecard, which is trying to sell pieces of its embattled company while rivals pick up its clients, has struck a deal to sell its U.K. division, Wirecard Card Solutions, to Railsbank, an open banking and payments technology firm.

Unicomer Group, Latin America’s equivalent of Best Buy, has teamed up with YellowPepper to develop a digital credit app that acts as a financial services center for underbanked and unbanked consumers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has teed up a growth opportunity for the buy now, pay later (BNPL) financial industry, as recession worries made people receptive to entering short-term payment plans that can fit in a budget.

Providing core payment capabilities, like debit and credit or P2P, are a business necessity. But you must also have a host of complementary services and capabilities that surround these services, says Fiserv's Himanshu Patel.

Non-card APMs are no longer an option but an absolute necessity. If they are not available, businesses face a “transaction declined” scenario where their customers will simply go elsewhere, says gaming payments expert James Ashton.

As the coronavirus pandemic began, PayActiv waived fees for its earned wage access (EWA) user base. Eventually those fees returned, but they did not deter adoption.

For real-time payments to become a standard in U.S. billing and payment processing, businesses have to want what providers are developing. And that acceptance, or the interest in having an RTP option, is on the rise.

For Marqeta, the advancement of 3D Secure 2.0 in Europe presented an opportunity to design its own version of the online security protocol in order to claim ownership of the standard and provide more flexibility for its use with customers.

Consumers are right to worry about data mismanagement. But there are ways to benefit from analytics while respecting privacy, says Cape Privacy's Ché Wijesinghe.

The Fed's faster payments platform may well roll out in three or four years, but by then it will already be outdated.

The past few months have provided no shortage of crises that call out for faster access to funds, giving developers a new impetus to hasten transaction processing.

The decentralizing of accounts payable and supply chains is a chance to turn to virtual cards, says Nvoicepay's Kristin Cardinali.

Epic, the maker of Fortnite, is suing Apple and Google for forcing app makers to hand over a 30% cut of their revenue to the tech giants. The grievance against Apple is pretty clear-cut; the attack on Google is more nuanced, and could have major consequences for the payments industry.

As health care payments increasingly look like traditional retail payments with various provider-consumer touchpoints, those acquiring hospital and medical clients are also turning to a payment facilitator model to secure contracts.

Appearing to support decentralized systems, the acting comptroller of the currency said on a podcast that "the ultimate public ownership of the payment rails is when you have a network, like the internet, of interconnected institutions and computers."

Stripe is expanding its digital payment technology into new industries, and is also welcoming a series of notable executives with backgrounds that are mostly outside merchant technology. But they also have experience with much larger companies, a necessary skill as Stripe tries to grow out of its status as fintech upstart.

A good security strategy is a lot like a healthy lifestyle for small businesses, says Sysnet's Sandra Higgins.