Payments

The fintech community was both surprised and energized by recent news that Visa has agreed to acquire Plaid, one of the nation’s largest fintech platforms for financial data analytics.

The future of brick and mortar retail is somewhere in the swamps of Jersey. Buried beneath a virtual sea in a place once called Xanadu is an underwater version of New York, a nautical Times Square where marquees scream “Piranha of the Opera,” and “Krill Grill.”

Providing simple and rapid claims payouts is a competitive feature in the property and casualty insurance industry. Both Visa and Mastercard see insurance payouts as a use case for their respective card-to-card transfer services, Visa Direct and Mastercard Send.

By experimenting with palm-print hand wave transactions, Amazon is putting its resources behind another work-in-progress technology that traditional retailers will almost certainly have to invest in just to keep pace.

The local payments acceptance technology of cross-border fintech dLocal is now available for Amazon users in Chile.

Ebanx isn't new to the payments technology game in Latin America, having focused on cross-border e-commerce technology a few years ago to allow consumers in that region to make purchases from international merchants.

Moynihan says the bank’s consumer market share could be doubled; retail terminals would connect customer’s hand print with their card information.

Last week, Indian regulators ordered an antitrust probe of Walmart and Amazon while Jeff Bezos and other Amazon execs traveled to New Delhi to tout a $1 billion investment to digitize local businesses. The message is U.S. investment is welcome, as long as U.S.-driven data mining is kept at bay.

U.K. digital payments provider and challenger bank Revolut is closing soon on its latest fundraising round with investors, including Technology Crossover Ventures, providing a $7 billion to $8 billion valuation for the startup.

While not as large as the U.S. both in number of people and number of credit card owners, the U.K. remains a very lucrative market for issuing banks and card networks, as well as a host of alternative financial service providers catering to younger, underserved consumers.