Payments

Payment preferences significantly vary from region to region, making the need to cater to local payment methods crucial, according to Steve Villegas, vice president of partner management at PPRO.

PayU is expanding its umbrella of payment companies in developing markets in a $70 million deal to buy Wibmo, a Cupertino, Calif.-based digital payments company that integrates with banks in 20 countries for payment authentication and security.

Transactions along the supply chain are a particularly good use case, argues Vinay Pai, senior vice president of engineering at Bill.com.

As Gen Z and the generations that succeed them begin to use financial services, digital capabilities become a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. By planning now, irrelevance in the near future can be avoided, writes John Mitchell, CEO of Episode Six.

Mastercard and MercadoPago, the payments arm of Latin American e-marketplace MercadoLibre, see opportunities for contactless prepaid cards among unbanked consumers even though local issuers have been slow to adopt the format.

More consumers were late in paying two major types of loans in the latest figures from the American Bankers Association, but it appears to be a relatively isolated problem.

Social media commerce platform provider Jumper.ai is helping Amazon merchants complete online transactions without the buyer being redirected to the Amazon online marketplace.

Alipay Financial Services’ Hong Kong unit is collaborating with McDonald’s, enabling consumers to order and pay for items at the fast-food chain within the AlipayHK wallet.

Over time, Pinterest has built a powerful e-commerce and payments engine underneath its social network site. This enables any Pinterest post to double as a portal for commerce — one that is especially powerful on mobile.

Following its own economic downturn that required bailouts by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain’s governors hit on an economic recovery plan that includes turning the tiny nation into a global payments hub.

In 2016, a big-bank consortium said that it would charge the same prices to all institutions, regardless of their size. But now the group has added a large caveat to that pledge.

The largest U.S. banks got a head start in launching Zelle through their mobile apps about 18 months ago, working closely with Zelle’s owner Early Warning Services LLC. It’s taking longer for smaller institutions to get up and running, due to some technical complexity.

With the U.K. government still at stalemate over Brexit, the prospect of leaving the European Union without a deal remains a very real possibility. Despite some recent agreements, this could have major implications for the U.K. payments industry.

JPMorgan Chase has joined the Single Euro Payments Area real-time payments scheme by adding the Sepa Instant Credit rail to its network in Europe.

Amazon Go is caving to rising pressure from cities and states banning cashless stores and planning to introduce cash-acceptance to a model whose entire premise was about eliminating the friction of checkout with a seamless, card-based checkout.

Contactless transit fare systems are drawing lots of investment despite several false starts in the U.S. But new numbers out of London show there are clear and multiple benefits if the infrastructure can catch up.

Cash is expensive, overseas cards may be illegal and cryptocurrency is unreliable, argues David Ehrlich, COO and co-founder of Zodaka, who says e-wallets are an answer.

Mastercard has joined forces with Microsoft, Workday and the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service to recruit younger prospects to work with the CIA, the FBI, the DoD and the EPA battling global cyberattacks.

A Cleveland startup’s play in the crowded and noisy P2P market is to nudge the transaction as close to digital version of paper money as possible — without Venmo’s social tools or Zelle’s email model.

National Australia Bank is utilizing the end-to-end transaction tracking system through Swift's Global Payments Innovation system, making it the first bank in Australia to allow business customers to track international payments through one click on an account platform.