Payments

Associate partner Mary Ann Francis is a risk taker — the kind who jumps off a waterfall without a parachute. She brings this same boldness to her work at IBM, where her decades of banking experience help the tech giant find new opportunities for artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

This year's Most Influential Women in Payments honorees are uniquely positioned to make the most of disruptive factors such as the advancement of artificial intelligence, central bank digital currencies and real-time payments. 

Amazon.com is closing eight cashierless Amazon Go locations in Seattle, New York and San Francisco, marking the e-commerce giant's latest round of cost-cutting amid slowing sales growth. 

A new product enables consumers to initiate a transaction by typing in a merchant's web domain — even if that business doesn't have an e-commerce site. It's the web-hosting company's latest bid to provide more to small proprietors.

Nationwide Building Society and HSBC Holdings toughened limits on retail customers' access to cryptoassets in the last week, becoming the latest U.K. banks to impose curbs after industry scandals and regulatory warnings.

Jack Dorsey's digital payment company Block said it will be using its own bitcoin reserves to provide liquidity to bitcoin's Lightning Network, a protocol meant to make transactions on the blockchain more efficient.

New research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicates consumers relying on BNPL loans are much more likely to use payday and pawn loans, revolve credit card balances and overdraw their bank accounts.

The banks that own Zelle face long odds in displacing Apple Pay and Google Pay, but the effort could help build the infrastructure for a new account-to-account payment system, some experts say.

In the starkest warning yet by a U.S. bank catering to the sector, Silvergate said it needs more time to assess the extent of damage to its finances stemming from last year's crypto rout — including whether it can remain viable.

Citizens Financial Group, which has offered point-of-sale financing for iPhones sold through Apple since 2015, is finding that as objects such as refrigerators become more complex and internet-connected, they are also more frequently replaced — creating new categories for installment lending.