Point-of-sale

There is no disputing that China is ahead of the rest of the world in mobile payments. What insight does it offer U.S. bankers?

The technology company's major projects over the past couple of years have included a diversification to serve merchants' cross-channel shopping and payment needs, adding advanced ATM technology in Europe and upgrading hardware to compete with rivals such as Square.

Fallout from the Fed's blow to Wells Fargo; a call for calm in the rush to regulate cryptocurrencies; point-of-sale lending has its day; and more.

It’s not necessarily new, but a confluence of trends — advances in technology, changing consumer preferences and banks’ need to diversify their balance sheets — has made it more popular than ever.

Grupo Coppel and Insikt, an online lender, would appear to be cut from different cloth, but they share an expertise in providing credit to working-class, largely Hispanic consumers. The retail conglomerate also operates 1,000 bank branches in Mexico, mixing banking and commerce in a way that U.S. regulators have not allowed.

The machine is among the more commonly pitched solutions for high-risk merchants that can't normally handle payment cards because banks won’t partner with them. But for dispensaries, they can be a hassle.

Vantiv, the largest U.S. merchant acquirer, agreed to buy the e-commerce payments company Worldpay Group for about £8 billion ($10.4 billion).

Attacks on ATMs and point-of-sale machines are getting more sophisticated and frequent. Crooks are trying to get as much use as they can out of their skimming devices before the migration to chip cards is complete.