This third and final installment of the Faster Payments series examines some ways the payments industry can get to “yes” on viable solutions—and thereby actually make some progress in making payments more secure and efficient as well as faster.  The Fed will have an indispensable role in fostering paths to …

Square Inc. launched in the United Kingdom, its fourth national market outside the United States and its first in Europe (it already operates in Canada, Japan, and Australia). While the U.K. foothold gives the firm a base from which to expand within the European market, it did not indicate specific …

Part I of this three-part series outlined the development of the realization by the Fed’s payments task forces that payments are complicated, difficult, and expensive to change in order to make them safer and more efficient.  This installment deals with the growing concern about security threats that are shaping the …

This article is the first installment of a three-part series this week on what the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payment Initiative means to the payment economy in the U.S., and how the payments ecosystem might get to “yes” on fixing what’s broken and deploying what’s possible. This part deals with the …

• Several veteran credit card executives, mostly from Bank of America and Capital One, have formed a new company to issue a credit card branded “Ollo.” Rob Habgood, formerly with both BofA and Capital One, is chief executive of the newly formed issuer, Fair Square Financial Holdings. Other executives with …

The subscription model is coming to payments for transit fares. Delerrok Inc., a transit fare-system provider, launched TouchPass this week, a fare-collection service that transit operators pay for via a subscription. TouchPass, a product of transit veterans Bob Hamilton, Gary Yamamura, and Susumu Kusakabe, who is a patent holder for …

• Wells Fargo & Co. will introduce cardless withdrawals to all 13,000 of its ATMs after testing the smart-phone-based service in various locales, a bank executive told Reuters. Wells reportedly is the first bank to roll out cardless ATM withdrawals across its entire ATM fleet. • ATM network operator Cardtronics plc …

• Payments Canada, which owns and operates that nation’s payment clearing and settlement infrastructure, has hired consulting firm Accenture to advise it on a multiyear program called Modernization, which is aimed at creating a faster-payments regime. • Payments-solutions provider ACI Worldwide said its network of more than 130 payment-service providers serving more …

The name might evoke yawns, but the messaging standard known as ISO 20022 will be playing an increasingly important role in electronic payments in the future. The standard goes beyond bare-bones data related to a payment to facilitate the exchange of more information. The Federal Reserve Banks are encouraging more …

• Payments-automation specialist linked2pay has added a real-time merchant-onboarding capability to its Bank Centric Payments platform, allowing independent sales organizations and other resellers enrolled with a sponsor bank to register, underwrite, and board merchants for card processing electronically and immediately. • Mobile-commerce provider Sionic Mobile said it is integrating its ION Commerce …