Payments

The London-based firm is seeking a license that would provide a direct connection between merchants and card networks, reducing reliance on third parties and brandishing the London company's image as a player in America.

The CardWorks subsidiary has officially taken over Ally Financial's Ollo credit card portfolio, ending a five-year dance between the two companies that first had Ally buying CardWorks for $2.7 billion.

As consumers use digital subscriptions for everything from streaming movies to cooking meals, financial apps are taking different approaches to helping their customers navigate recurring payments. Should banks get in on the action?

The payments company is opening its real-time payments network, Visa Direct, to stablecoins through a prefunding pilot that will allow businesses to move money across borders when banks are closed.

A flurry of product launches are designed to keep the payment company's merchants in-house by making it easier to deploy artificial intelligence-driven payments and stablecoins.

Real-time cross-border payments are in demand, but lack interoperability — creating demand for Swift and Ripple to add new tech. Plus, PayPal pledges to add payment technology in the Middle East and Africa, and more international payments and fintech news.

Eight years after its launch, Early Warning's peer-to-peer payments platform Zelle is so ubiquitous it's almost a verb. It's looking for similar recognition for Paze in its jersey patch partnership with the NBA's Atlanta Hawks.

The bank added an AI assistant to improve business payment tools, a move that comes at the same time that Citigroup and Temenos pushed their strategies for emerging AI at banks.