Venture funding

Klar has completed two funding rounds — one for equity and one for debt — raising over $57 million in funding, including Santander’s InnoVentures as an equity investor.

The major technology companies that have chipped away at incumbent payment businesses face much larger competition from this year’s big processing mergers, but they’ve also bulked up through fundraising and product development.

Goldman Sachs, Elevar Equity and QED Investors are among institutions financing Mexican lenders that fund SMEs.

Mission Lane, which was spun off from LendUp in December, said Monday that Shane Holdaway took the helm in August after roughly a year serving as CEO of Barclays' U.S. consumer bank. The upstart lender also announced that it has raised $200 million in equity funding.

Plaid, the San Francisco-based financial technology infrastructure provider, has received strategic investments from Mastercard and Visa as part of a $250 million round of funding. Plaid did not disclose the two networks' specific investments.

Fintechs providing installment loans are attracting significant funding from investors who see opportunities in developed economies for consumer financing products, which are already well established in emerging markets.

The bank helped raise $25 million for the fintech because of its potential to bring banks and nonbanks together in a virtual marketplace.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is making another bet on a Latin American financial-technology startup, providing a secured credit facility of as much as $100 million to Mexico’s Konfio Ltd.

Checkout-free technology is very limited in availability and very much a work in progress, but developers and investors are relying on its promise to accelerate payments' broader evolution from streamlining execution to determining intent.

Changing consumer attitudes about these companies and the emergence of open banking have made them appealing to venture investors, whose commitments rose 15% in the first half of the year.

VCs have been devoting more attention — and funding — to U.K.-based digital remittance providers such as TransferWise, Revolut, WorldRemit and their smaller rival Paysend.

Klarna raised another $460 million in fresh equity funding, pushing the Swedish company’s valuation to about $5.5 billion.

Investors are making bets on checkout-free retail, a category that is just as challenging as it is innovative. But it's payment technology's race to the moon, a chance to seize a favorable position in the struggle to save retail.

Starbucks is looking to reclaim its role as the global leader in streamlined, intuitive order-and-pay systems through machine learning technology it’s developing in-house and through a deal with restaurant-tech startup Brightloom, its new equity investment partner.

A centerpiece of her “economic patriotism” bill is to transform private equity firms, which she said will buy a company and bleed it dry before “walking away enriched even as the company succumbs.”

Visa Inc. has become the latest investor in ride-hailing giant Go-Jek as the two companies push digital payments across Southeast Asia.

While senders prefer mobile devices, recipients remain stubbornly attached to receiving cash.

The new funding comes as the challenger bank inches closer to gaining regulatory approval for a national bank charter.

Just a few months after leading a funding round for Berlin-based fintech company Elinvar, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is backing another startup in the German capital.

Finix, a startup offering tools for businesses to develop their own payments technology, has raised $17.5 million in Series A funding from investors that include Bain Capital and Visa.