Stories too good to be true often aren’t. The curtain has at long last been pulled back on high-flying payments fintech Wirecard AG. A whopping $2.1 billion in cash on its balance sheet can’t be verified and likely never existed. Chief executive Markus Braun has resigned and was arrested. Chief …

Mastercard Inc.’s $825-million deal for Finicity Corp., announced Tuesday, may be aimed at ensuring a strong position in burgeoning markets like point-of-sale credit, but it could also prove handy as consumers struggle with the financial fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, observers say. The acquisition, which Mastercard says should close by …

Varo Money Inc., a 5-year-old mobile-banking and payments startup that’s closing in on a national banking charter, raised $241 million in a Series D round that closed Tuesday. The round, co-led by Gallatin Point Capital and The Rise Fund, will help the San Francisco-based Varo expand its financial-product offerings and …

This special code has made possible everything from mobile payments to open banking. Now, get ready for the next stage in the evolution of this remarkable technology. It seems like it was just yesterday that a group of technology experts from the major California banks were sitting around a table …

The guide has a slightly different name now, but the same purpose—to seek out and describe the nonbank players, apart from the big networks, that are rewriting the rules for the digital exchange of value. Since 2004, Digital Transactions has traced the course of payments innovation through its nimblest practitioners—the …

In an update, eBay Inc. said it will expand its managed-payments platform later this year to Australia and Canada. The platform, which funnels payments to a variety of processors through a gateway provided by Adyen, has processed more than $2 billion so far for more than 25,000 sellers in the United States, …

Protecting the ubiquitous code that enables untold numbers of payments connections is no easy matter. It’s also critical. Just how attractive to criminals are the networking connections between payments and financial-services companies, on the one hand, and third parties, on the other? Extremely. Witness that one day in August 2019, …

No, that’s not an oxymoron. The big, 46-year-old network, with links to virtually every bank in the country, is on a growth tear. Here’s why. One of the biggest untold stories in the payments industry lies ready to hand for anyone who wants to check the numbers. It’s about a …

The federal government and the state of Utah this week cleared the way for a controversial industrial loan corporation to be set up by Square Inc. that could help the payments company cement ties with its merchant base. But the approvals also drew fierce opposition from banking groups concerned about …

The electronic-payments industry is settling into a ride-it-out mode as panic selling resumed Thursday on Wall Street over the coronavirus, now deemed a pandemic by the World Health Organization. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 1,700 points, and most payments stocks went over the cliff with it. In late-morning …