Payments

The U.S. card brands plan to acquire European firms for security and subscription payments, while Bank of America seeks new markets for its virtual B2B business and JPMorgan Chase's blockchain unit gains ground.

Many people are jumping on the AI bandwagon without asking the most basic questions. FICO Chief Analytics Officer Scott Zoldi, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical and computational physics from Duke University, has been in the business long enough to see the warning signs.

The state's ill-conceived law banning interchange fees on sales tax and gratuities will be burdensome and expensive to implement and could portend a patchwork of state-level copycat legislation that would balkanize the payments system.

The payment protocol, years in the making, includes more information for transactions, aiding real-time processing, international commerce, risk management and overall accuracy. But it also requires a lot of work.

The Federal Reserve's apparent unwillingness to disclose volumetric details about banks' use of its proprietary faster payments network suggests the central bank is hiding something. That something could be the slow death of faster payments as the new normal.

The new real-time payments system is being optimized for speed, not necessarily security, requiring the banks participating in the program to exercise a heightened level of vigilance.

Instant payment adoption in the U.S. is growing but still trails countries such as Brazil and India. Generative artificial intelligence could be the key to help financial institutions accelerate payment velocity.

As the company bolsters artificial intelligence-powered point of sale and battles other fintechs and the card networks, getting a boost with distribution has become a major priority.