Ending months of speculation, the Federal Reserve confirmed Monday it will launch a real-time payments service by 2023 or 2024. The banking regulator, which also published Monday a notice in the Federal Register outlining its plan and requesting comment, will thus take what it says is its biggest move in …

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to announce Monday whether it will enter the business of real-time payments as an operator competing with existing private-sector players.  A so-called public option from the national banking regulator could please retailers and small financial institutions concerned about whether the nascent real-time payments market …

Under pressure from changing market conditions and challenges from digital-based competitors, money-transfer giants The Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International Inc. both reported disappointing second-quarter results. In addition, Denver-based Western Union said it will chop its workforce by 10% over the coming months as part of a cost-reduction campaign it …

As Square Inc. enters its 11th year in business, observers have noted how it is depending increasingly on sales to larger sellers. But its financial results for the second quarter, released Thursday, indicate how the San Francisco-based company is also depending more and more on its rapidly growing consumer business, …

Consumers are making more debit card transactions without the physical card, and fraudsters are taking notice, according to a major study released Thursday. Transactions such as e-commerce payments, push payments, and peer-to-peer transfers using the accounts backing debit cards, but not the plastic itself, are rising dramatically, according to the …

Big merchants like Amazon.com Inc. are celebrated for virtually friction-free transaction flows, and now that’s putting pressure on the point-of-sale vendors that serve small businesses. That’s because clients want the same kind of experience for their customers, but don’t know how to go about it, a panel of experts said …

In what may be the biggest anticlimax in their careers, employees at First Data Corp. will walk into their offices Monday morning as employees of Fiserv Inc. And if Fiserv chief executive Jeffery Yabuki’s ambitions prove fruitful, the combined company will play a leading role in fending off nonbanks like …

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s payments juggernaut shows no signs of weakening, but the company has found its latest product integrations bedeviled by slowdowns, forcing it to postpone some expected revenue. One such integration with bill-payment specialist Paymentus Corp. is a crucial one because it will allow PayPal to enter an enormous, …

The Zelle peer-to-peer payments network is starting to click for the smaller, everyday transfers it was designed to handle. Early Warning Services LLC, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based banking-technology company that runs the 2-year-old network, reported on Tuesday that Zelle handled $44 billion in volume in the second quarter on 171 million …

Whether most consumers will ultimately use Alexa or Siri or some other voice-activated device to make purchases may depend crucially on how much money is at risk.  As it turns out, slightly more than half of U.S. consumers would be comfortable using the technology to pay for relatively small-ticket goods …