Payments

When the former vice president and Massachusetts senator appear together in Houston, they could present two contrasting visions of financial policy within the presidential field.

The large payment processor mergers were meant to give bigger companies a better way to compete against the nimble startups that were luring their customers away for digital services such as mobile point of sale. And post-merger, Fiserv and First Data have fired their first salvo.

MoneyGram has partnered with Visa to leverage debit push payments for P2P transfers in the U.S., with plans to eventually expand the service internationally.

Brexit, the U.S.-China trade war, and warning signs of a recession are pressuring cross-border supply chains, accelerating the impetus to streamline payment processing for transactions that are still relatively large, recurring and paper-based.

The six biggest banks are expected to issue disappointing forecasts as rates continue to decline; technology stock mutual funds scored with payment plays.

Enterprise payments remain a complex litany of disparate processes burdened by fraud, labor and errors, says Troovo's Kurt Knackstedt.

While Gen Z is just beginning to transition into adulthood there are some healthy indicators of how it is approaching credit as well as how it manages debt.

Mobile payments speed and convenience is more than an abstraction, and needs to be quantified, says UJET's Anand Janefalkar.

There's been a significant lag in how financial institutions serve commercial clients with mobile technology, and that creates an opportunity for credit unions.

Although those fintech companies whose primary service is the provision of faster payments may face a future threat for the proposed FedNow Service, fintech companies may also benefit from the availability of a Fed-led real-time payments network, Jeffrey Alberts and Dustin Nofziger of Pryor Cashman write.