The entire financial-services industry shot itself in the foot with free checking. Free checking taught customers that they should not pay any fees for the services they receive from banks and other financial companies. The attitude is, “Why should I pay to access my own money?” Since these same customers …

With the close of Block Inc.’s $29-billion acquisition of buy now, pay later platform Afterpay Ltd. at the end of January, the payments company installed a key component in a plan to more tightly integrate its seller and consumer businesses, Square and Cash App, according to Block’s top executives. Indeed, …

That visual, machine-interface technology we all know from the grocery store is experiencing a renaissance. The first item to be marked with a Universal Product Code or barcode tracks back more than forty years. But now the technology is brand new again, expanded in form to the quick-response (QR) code …

The pandemic has “fast-tracked” adoption of the automated clearing house network for business-to-business payments, while transactions cleared and settled through the network on the same day they’re initiated are booming, according to full-year 2021 numbers released Thursday by Nacha, the governing body for the nationwide network. The annual results complement …

The market for direct transfers between bank accounts is attracting fintechs—as well as the two global card networks—as real-time payments loom. While account-to-account transactions—think the automated clearing house—have been around for years, the shift to real-time payments is giving them a new boost. Little happens overnight in the payments industry. …

U.S. Bank said it will launch in the first quarter a real-time payments component to its bill service. It will use the Request for Payment tool that is part of The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC’s Real Time Payments service. The same service launched for U.S. Bank business customers in November.Cloud-software …

The boom in iGaming—online poker and casino games—and sports betting is generating big potential for payments companies. Can they cash in? Payments companies looking for new markets might wager on the online sports betting and casino games market. It could reap big dividends, especially as more states allow these forms …

A new competitor in the peer-to-peer payments landscape emerged Wednesday with the introduction of CHUCK, an open-loop P2P network founded by 10 community banks. The new network uses technology from digital payments platform provider Payrailz that enables customers of any of the member banks to send money to a debit card …

To help speed and simplify cross-border payments for businesses, Euronet Worldwide, a Leawood, Kansas-based fintech, on Wednesday launched Dandelion, an end-to-end real-time cross-border payment network.  Typically, initiating a cross-border transaction is a slow and manually driven process that involves exchanging emails, phone calls, and invoices between participating parties. Further slowing …

After more than 18 months of pandemic, are you on the road to normal? In this, our annual catalog of woes and worries, we shine the spotlight on that road’s biggest potholes. Well, nobody signed up for this, right? More than a year-and-a-half after what had been a booming economy …