Getting to universal real-time payments in the United States will depend on reaching smaller banking institutions, and on Wednesday The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC may have created the potential to scoop up a significant number of these endpoints via a deal with the major processor FIS Inc. The two …

The impact of the economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic has affected payments of all sorts, but perhaps none so much as consumer bill payments. Indeed, some 56% of consumers said it was harder to pay bills because they’d lost their jobs or had sustained a reduction in income, …

Real-time payment flows are coming to processor settlements with merchants as Visa Inc. enlarges the market for its Visa Direct push-payment service. The latest development emerged this week with EVO Payments Inc.’s launch of EVO Direct Deposit, a service that relies on Visa Direct to credit U.S. merchant accounts. The …

As workers struggle with cash-flow issues that in some cases were worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, banks and fintechs are working to get wages into employees’ hands faster—sometimes in real time. Two such developments emerged this week from Square Inc. and Immediate Solutions Inc., a company that specializes in speeding …

Momentum behind a standard for the exchange of consumers’ financial data between fintech apps and banks gained strength Monday with an announcement that a trade group supporting the standard has added 39 members since April. The group, the Reston, Va.-based Financial Data Exchange LLC, now claims a membership of 140 firms, …

The years-long effort to bring real-time payments to the United States picked up steam on Thursday with an announcement from The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC that 70% of U.S. deposit accounts can now access real-time capability via agreements between TCH and third-party processors. “What we’re talking about here is …

The pandemic has sparked a huge lift in online gift card sales as consumers make shopping for the plastic part of their e-commerce routine. The number of cards purchased online soared 57% in the first six months of this year compared to the first half of 2019. Some 52% of …

Evidence emerged Tuesday that Covid-19 fears are far from suppressing investor interest in payments as two U.S. and two European companies announced funding news. Atlanta-based Rev.io, an 18-year-old provider of billing platforms, said it has received a “significant growth equity investment” from Primus Capital. The company did not disclose the …

In the nearly four months since it underwent a major downgrade in the incentive it offers miners, Bitcoin has seen its price rise nicely, but holders of the digital currency have not yet, at least, witnessed the wild upswing that followed the last such adjustment. Bitcoin was trading at $10,483 …

The data networks that connect payments and other financial apps to users’ bank accounts are scrambling to standardize data access by moving to application programming interfaces and away from an older, cruder form of access known in the business as “screen scraping.” The effort comes as financial apps gain popularity …