Payments

U.S. payment giants like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and PayPal — along with smaller companies like Paysera in Lithuania — have blocked transactions or pulled out of Russia and Belarus in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

Sberbank said it’s looking at the possibility of issuing cards using the Russian payments system Mir and China’s UnionPay after Visa and Mastercard suspended operations following the invasion of Ukraine. 

Block, the digital payments company run by Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, is under investigation by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and multiple state attorneys general in connection with its Cash App service.

Zeta Services, a banking and credit card technology unicorn, has raised $30 million from investors including Mastercard, and the two announced a five-year collaboration to help customers launch credit card services.  

The companies' moves came a day after Visa and Mastercard said they were halting business in Russia because of its attack on Ukraine.

Russia reverberations, a rebranding, a resignation and more in banking news this week.

Sendi Young, the blockchain company's European managing director, discussed how a partnership with fintech Modulr supports its ongoing efforts to streamline money movement in a world where many payment rails predate the modern internet.

Visa has suspended access for certain clients as it works to comply with sanctions imposed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Merchants Payments Coalition is appealing to lawmakers to reform credit card interchange rates as Visa and Mastercard prepare to increase some fees next month after a yearlong delay.

Mastercard said it got about 4% of its net revenues last year from business linked to Russia, as Western nations level sanctions against the country for its invasion of Ukraine.

The Federal Reserve Board is taking a fresh look at how financial firms get coveted access to the U.S. central bank’s payment system — a controversial question that’s weighing on President Biden’s pick to be Wall Street’s top bank regulator.

The bank is using Aliaswire’s integration of its BillerDirect platform with Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange to power transactions across multiple channels.

The card brands have blocked Russia's large banks from their networks in response to the Ukraine invasion, a move that may dramatically limit retail transactions and cash availability at ATMs.

The European Union is discussing the exclusion of seven Russian banks from the Swift financial messaging system, but the proposed list spares the nation’s biggest lender and a bank part-owned by the Russian gas giant Gazprom. 

With the buy now/pay later market cooling and regulatory scrutiny increasing, Zip aims to rapidly scale with merchants and consumers.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said disconnecting Russian banks from the Swift messaging system may bring “unintended consequences” that include third parties finding ways around the penalty.

With tensions high between Russia and the West, Synechron is looking to develop a real-time kill switch that can shut down a malware threat. The company’s PayTech Accelerator is also focusing on the opportunity for banks in buy now/pay later lending.

Wall Street gets an automated nonfungible tokens machine, credit union arrivals and departures, and more in banking news this week.

The firms are working to make this subset of cryptocurrency — which is designed to avoid wild swings in valuation — easier to adopt and more useful for routine transactions by focusing on "last mile, or user experience layer," says Jeremy Allaire, Circle's CEO.

Cloud-hosted systems add flexibility to develop payment and lending services that aren't possible on legacy platforms. “We want to develop products that suit our customers rather than what our core provider tells us to provide,” said Samantha Pause, chief marketing and benefit officer at Mascoma Bank in New Hampshire.