Circle Internet Financial has moved beyond Bitcoin to social payments. But its ambitions don’t stop there. Bitcoin remains a financial-services buzzword. But it’s becoming more and more clear that the cryptocurrency will be relegated to back-office processes outside the consumer’s awareness. Seeing this movement, Jeremy Allaire, founder and chief executive …

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …

Efforts to create unique identification markers for consumers across different merchants will be a challenge for many merchants this year, SIX Payment Services, the payment-processing arm of SIX, operator of Switzerland’s financial-market infrastructure, notes in a report released Wednesday. “Some payment-service providers are working on the idea of introducing a …

The nascent faster-payments space is still working to tie together fractured payment networks and overcome interoperability issues that make it difficult for most SMBs to take advantage of the touted benefits. As businesses continuously seek new ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs, many companies large and small are working …

Payments Canada, operator of three major payment systems in that country, issued a five-point plan Thursday to put Canada on a path toward faster and more efficient electronic payments. The plan has many similarities with efforts by Canada’s southern neighbor to modernize payments, but also some differences, according to a …

It may be called artificial intelligence, but the potential this technology opens up for payments and banking is turning out to be very real. Earlier this week, yet another major messaging platform agreed to support chatbots that would let its users transfer funds, check their bank balances, and perform other …

EMV after effects dominate our list of headaches this year. Still, from regulation to faster payments to interchange uncertainty, there are plenty of other issues to contend with. In the 10 years we have compiled our annual list of pressing issues facing the payments industry, no single theme has dominated …

All the talk about real-time transactions has focused on non-card rails. But all the action has centered on a little-known transaction type that just happens to be offered by Visa and MasterCard. The late summer’s rash of announcements for ready-to-go, real-time payments without the need for a big new network …

MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. reported Monday that online-payments specialist Stripe Inc. is using their instant-payment services to pay merchants such as ride-sharing service Lyft and other users of Stripe’s marketplaces. Stripe actually began offering what it calls Instant Payouts relying on the network services—Mastercard Send and Visa Direct—to merchants as …