Banks have closed thousands of branches in recent years, hitting rural America especially hard and leaving retail ATMs, prepaid cards, and services from non-bank providers to fill the void, according to a new Federal Reserve report. The “Perspectives from Main Street: Bank Branch Access in Rural Communities” report released Monday …

Observers of mobile wallets have focused attention on user counts as a sign of adoption, but that leaves open the question of how many of these consumers are turning into habitual users. As it turns out, mobile-payments apps have a much harder time retaining users than do banking apps, according …

Venture capital continues to flow to payments companies, which ranked among the top recipients of financial-technology sector funding in the third quarter, according to a new report. And credit-union services organization PSCU announced it will invest $100 million in its payments platform over the next three years. Sweden-based Klarna, a …

HSBC Bank USA N.A. has made a real-time payments service, via The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, available to its commercial and institutional clients. HSBC said these clients have been able to receive real-time payments since July and now can send them. HSBC expects to roll out the service to its consumer …

Merchant processor Priority Technology Holdings Inc. posted an 11% increase in payment volume in the third quarter despite the wind-down of its once-sizable processing business for online subscription billers. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Priority said it processed $10.8 billion in merchant bank card volume versus $9.71 billion in 2018’s third quarter, on …

Now that Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, …

A retail trade association as well as Target Corp. have endorsed the Federal Reserve’s planned FedNow real-time gross settlement service. In a letter posted last week on the official FedNow comment site, the Washington, D.C.-based Retail Industry Leaders Association said “over the past decades RILA has seen competition and innovation …

Thanks to an influx of technological advancements, individuals now have more choices than ever to save and manage their money. But ensuring that financial tools are best serving consumers takes cooperation among regulators, policymakers, and the private sector. Recently, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Jelena McWilliams said the agency will …

Twenty European banks are working on setting up a pan-European payment system to challenge Visa, Mastercard and technology companies such as Google and PayPal, according to press reports. The project is code-named PEPSI, for Pan European Payment System Initiative.In a development that signals an opening in China’s long-protected payments environment, Chinese mobile-payment giants …

Having just swallowed the massive processor Worldpay Inc., Fidelity National Information Services Inc. will stay on the sidelines for a while when it comes to any more major acquisitions, its chief executive said Tuesday. Meanwhile, the combined company’s update indicated it is now on track to deliver more than $1 …