Despite its detractors, the so-called gig economy that relies on freelance workers looks like it’s here to stay. And Lyft Inc., a leading ride-share provider that’s a major player in the gig economy, would like to see the payments industry evolve to meet the gig economy’s needs. Ashwin Raj, the …

Distributed-ledger payments provider Ripple Labs on Thursday announced three cryptocurrency exchanges that will work with its xRapid cross-border payments product. XRapid uses Ripple’s XRP digital currency and depends on exchanges to translate transactions into local fiat currencies. San Francisco-based Ripple said it is partnering with Bittrex for exchanges to U.S. …

Don’t look for many optimists in the payments industry when it comes to a future with less fraud. Fully 84% of those surveyed by TD Bank say payments fraud will become a bigger threat over the next one to two years. Released Tuesday, the survey, conducted this spring at the …

Dutch payments processor Adyen N.V. is in the limelight just as the payments business has gotten hot. Ant Financial just raised the biggest private funding round ever—$14 billion at a $150 billion valuation, in part on the back of its Alipay unit. These are new and nontraditional entrants. The old …

First it was retailers, which tried but failed. Now an airline trade group wants to develop a payment system that would bypass the credit card networks, theoretically saving carriers billions in interchange. The proposal comes from the International Air Transport Association, which says it has 280 members representing 83% of …

Financial institutions have been pushing real-time payments because they are supposed to be not only faster but also more cost-efficient. But now results of a global survey released Monday indicate merchants not only expect faster payments to be less expensive to accept, but also to displace the payment cards banks …

With a push from regulators and competitive forces, banks are stepping up their development of application programming interfaces to enhance their payment and other financial services. APIs, which provide links so that disparate software systems, such as those at a bank and a financial-technology company that wants to offer services …

We list 37 entries this year, of which only three appeared in our original Guide nine years ago. This year’s Field Guide represents our 10th annual effort to catalog the broad currents in electronic payments by listing some of the more salient players providing alternatives to the big network brands. …

The Federal Reserve announced Thursday that work began this month on a new study to measure fraud and associated costs to the U.S. payments system as well as identify fraud’s causes and contributing factors. After a competitive bidding process, the central bank hired Boston-based The Boston Consulting Group to do …

The Federal Reserve announced Thursday it is shutting down its Secure Payments Task Force this month. The Fed invited its more than 200 members, made up of payments executives from across the financial-services industry, to work with its FedPayments Improvement Community. Members may also participate in “new collaborative industry work …