An offshoot of artificial-intelligence research, chatbots emerged in 2016 as a popular technology for reaching and serving consumers for banking, payments, and shopping. Facebook’s Messenger app, which began supporting the bits of code this spring, was by September already crawling with 30,000 bots holding conversations with consumers to fulfill simple …

Startups and established players alike have been working out payments applications for distributed-ledger technology for several years, and on Thursday one of those applications went commercial. San Francisco-based Wyre, founded in 2013, launched its cross-border payments service based on the blockchain. On the same day, Wyre also raised $5.8 million in a …

After PayPal Holdings Inc. in July signed a sweeping agreement with Visa Inc., and in September reached a similar deal with MasterCard Inc., giving PayPal access to the card networks’ token engines and thereby new access to the physical point of sale, observers wondered when the other shoe would drop. It dropped …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have been tokenizing their payment cards since 2014, but have not been able to access tokens for cards branded by the other network. That will change soon as the result of an agreement announced separately Thursday by Visa and MasterCard. Under the agreement, Visa will be able …

The merger of messaging apps and payments took another step forward Wednesday with the news that The Western Union Co. is allowing U.K. users of the popular Viber service to send money from within the app. The deal follows a similar arrangement the money-transfer kingpin made with Viber for U.S. …

Online commerce gets a lot of attention these days, but just how much of the retail economy in North America does it account for? The answer is 7%, according to a report released Tuesday by Boston-based researcher Aite Group. That’s accounting for all e-commerce sales as well as browser-based and …

It’s a double whammy for VeriFone Systems Inc. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based terminal maker said its sales for next year will be “tempered” by a decision by the major payment networks to postpone their deadline for fuel-pump EMV from Oct. 1, 2017 to Oct. 1, 2020. “We were disappointed and …

In the struggle to produce commercially viable alternatives to the password for user authentication, most industry attention lately has focused on fingerprint recognition. But on Monday another promising alternative took a step forward with an announcement from Delta ID Inc., a 5-year-old Newark, Calif.-based company, that its ActiveIRIS technology is behind …

It may be called artificial intelligence, but the potential this technology opens up for payments and banking is turning out to be very real. Earlier this week, yet another major messaging platform agreed to support chatbots that would let its users transfer funds, check their bank balances, and perform other …

Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) has launched what it calls a network of early-stage financial-services technology startups that it says w The FIS HiPo Network, short for “high potential,” so far includes half a dozen fintech startups: Akouba, an online platform for the processing of small-business loans; Bleu, a …