The U.K. Treasury Ministry has said it is prohibiting merchants from assessing surcharges beginning January 1. Surcharges could be as much as 20% for purchases like a flight, the ministry said in a press release. In 2010, United Kingdom surcharges totaled 473 million pounds ($617 million). “Rip-off charges have no place in a modern Britain and …

Mastercard Inc. acquired Brighterion Inc., a software company specializing in artificial intelligence that Mastercard expects will enhance its customer-experience and fraud-prevention services for customers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. PayPal Holdings Inc. and Visa Inc. extended to Europe a collaboration deal first announced last summer. Under the agreement, PayPal’s European operation will promote …

Just over 6 billion payment cards now bear the UnionPay logo, and in 2016 the Chinese network accounted for 43% of all general-purpose credit and debit cards in the world, up from 41% in 2015, according to new findings from London-based Retail Banking Research. RBR estimates the worldwide payment card …

What’s the future of electronic payments? For many consumers, it’s one that incorporates biometrics for authentication and payments, finds a survey from Viewpost IP Holdings LLC, a business-to-business payments provider. In the survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, Viewpost found that 50% believe fingerprint technology—already in use with many …

Online-payments provider Stripe Inc. now allows merchants on its platform to accept payments from Chinese consumers through links to the China-based Alipay and WeChat Pay systems, Reuters reported. At a valuation of $9.2 billion, 7-year-old Stripe is the most valuable privately held payments startup. Alibaba Group, the China-based online marketplace, has launched the Taobao Group …

Israelis are much more likely to use mobile-banking apps and mobile wallets than Americans, but at least Americans are less inclined to use cash than Germans, according to a recent international survey of consumer usage of financial technology. The May survey of 5,860 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, …

The stock market has had a pretty good run so far this year, but shares of publicly traded payments firms are doing even better than the overall market. A group of thirty payment-related stocks tracked by Chicago-based Barrington Research Associates Inc. posted a mean return of 23.86% for the first …

Mobile-wallet transactions in the United States grew 333% from 2012 through 2015, albeit on a relatively small base, according to data released Friday by the Federal Reserve. Wallets generated 1.3 billion payments in 2015, the Fed data show, versus 300 million transactions three years earlier. That robust rate of growth …

As they rapidly evolve, biometric technologies are certain to play a greater role in payment authentication. But, given consumer acceptance and other issues, just how big this role will be is up for debate. With most new developments in payments, there’s a whole lot of talk before any discernible action. …

You know companies like PayPal, Shopify, and Square as high-tech payment processors. Lately, they’ve applied that technology to the established business of merchant cash advances, with promising results. Long the mainstays of the merchant cash-advance business, alternative lenders are facing competition from a new breed of players—tech companies with street …