Competitive Strategies

Four years after launching a peer-to-peer payments capability using the clearXchange network, Wells Fargo & Co. is enabling a real-time function for its service. Announced Monday, the enhancement enables Wells customers to send and receive real-time payments with no fee from and to customers of any bank that participates in …

• Grocery store giant The Kroger Co. filed a federal lawsuit against Visa Inc. accusing the card network of trying to force it to allow customers to verify EMV debit card purchases with signatures, and thereby route transactions to the Visa network, rather than with PINs as Kroger prefers, The …

The U.S. rollout of EMV is just one chapter—albeit a major one—in an unfolding international payments story, but another one is taking the stage that could have important implications both for faster payments and cross-border transactions. SWIFT, the Belgium-based international financial-messaging organization, announced on Tuesday that 73 financial institutions worldwide …

Getting point-of-sale terminals through the EMV-certification process should become a bit quicker thanks to the card brands’ efforts to “streamline” the testing process. That should bode well for POS terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc., says Vin D’Agostino, executive vice president of VeriFone Services. MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. separately announced programs that …

A second day of market turmoil in the wake of the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union once again took a big bite out of stocks of U.S.-based payments companies with large operations in the U.K. and Europe. For example, on a day when the major market indexes …

  Regulation of virtual currency at the state level is proving to be a stop-and-start affair. No other state has yet followed New York with its now famous “BitLicense” to regulate virtual currencies under existing law. But in North Carolina, a bill to update the state’s money-transmitter act could become …

Shares of U.S. payments companies fell even farther than the general market Friday as the world absorbed the news from Thursday’s stunning “Brexit” vote in the United Kingdom in which British voters signaled they want to leave the European Union. Whether today’s market carnage is a sign of future long-term …

Digital-currency specialist Circle Internet Financial Ltd. is expanding into China following a $60 million investment from a syndicate of investors. This follows a $50 million funding round raised last year by the Boston-based company. Circle enables users to send and receive funds instantly at no charge using blockchain technology. A …

• Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched Walmart Pay in 11 states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, Michigan, and Indiana. • Citing volatile exchange rates for the British pound, some money-transfer companies are temporarily suspending pound transfers until after results of today’s “Brexit” vote on …

Real-time payments have existed in various models for a long time. In fact, they’re probably most familiar to consumers as card payments, something that has been embedded in consumer culture for decades. However, in the United States, the development of real-time payments has lagged behind some areas of the world, a …