Payments

Stripe and JPMorgan Chase are firing rapid shots in their battle to win businesses, with faster payments as the centerpiece of their offerings.

High-tech heavyweights like Google, Amazon and Apple have tied payments to broader financial services, added to the view that banks are less relevant, writes Polyient Labs' Brad Robertson.

The world’s biggest restaurant company is buying startup Apprente Inc., a developer of voice-recognition technology for use in the restaurant industry, to help speed up lines. The idea is to eventually have a machine, instead of a person, on the other side of the intercom to relay orders to kitchen staff.

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.

The patent office is getting buried in applications for distributed ledger systems, a mountain of documents that chart a clear course toward making static identity and password protection irrelevant.

Stripe is joining the throng of providers offering merchant loans based on payment receivables with Stripe Capital, a service for e-commerce companies already using Stripe for payments processing.

They’ve scrapped the newspapers and beefed up the food, but most Starbucks cafes in the U.S. don’t look all that different today than they did a decade ago. That’s about to change.

As bans on sports betting ease in more states, payment processors are counting on new revenue streams, particularly as the NFL season gets underway.

There are lots of reasons for companies to have multiple payment accounts, though reconciliation can be a pain. But there are ways the cloud can mitigate the headaches, says Nvoicepay's Mike Fortmann.

Amazon is reportedly testing technology that allows contactless payments via a hand gesture, applying technology that would provide valuable insight to fuel other initiatives such as Amazon Go.

The Fed's development of a real-time payments systems has sparked a pointless debate about paper checks.