Moderating a panel of three investment executives who put money into startup payments firms and other financial-technology companies, Frank Young, senior vice president of innovation at merchant processor Global Payments Inc., noticed well into the Strategic Leadership Forum session Thursday that no one had mentioned artificial intelligence, machine learning, the …

Mastercard Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. announced they have extended to Canada, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East an agreement first reached last year for the U.S. market that clarifies Mastercard as an equal payment option in the PayPal wallet and gives PayPal access to Mastercard’s tokenization …

Merchant processor Worldpay participated in a funding round for machine-learning startup FeatureSpace and agreed to deploy the company’s technology for fraud prevention. Worldpay, which this summer agreed to be acquired by rival processor Vantiv Inc., did not disclose the amount of its investment. Merchant processor Elavon introduced Scoop, a program …

Bitcoin’s wild ride has enriched early investors but left payments geeks asking whether the cryptocurrency can ever be used to buy anything. Let’s say you were an early Bitcoin enthusiast, but not too early. Bitcoin appeared on the scene in 2010, but you, ever cautious about unproven stuff like this, …

If you get rich betting on a certain currency, does that make that currency real? Or must people and businesses agree to accept it as payment for goods and services? If these are the criteria for establishing whether Bitcoin is “real” or not, the 8-year-old cryptocurrency has passed the first …

Despite obstacles, payment processors and fintechs increasingly are looking at cross-border e-commerce for high-growth opportunities. Go global. That’s the credo an increasing number of payment processors and financial-technology firms subscribe to as technology transforms cross-border commerce from yesterday’s luxury into an attainable option for consumers today. Researcher Talie Baker, a …

Distributed-ledger technology (DLT) may radically telescope the time for a new payments technology to reach significant commercial use. Forty years passed between the chip card’s invention and its widespread use, and 25 years went by from when a patent was issued for check-imaging technology until Check 21 fully exploited image-item …

Years ago, when banks wanted to sign up more merchants for credit card acceptance, they turned to non-bank third parties to sell the service. Now, these same third parties are starting to sell Bitcoin acceptance along with credit and debit cards. Aliant Payment Systems Inc., a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based independent …

Showing resilience after recent actions that pummeled its value, Bitcoin shot up from the depths early Monday and was trading above $4,000 again. As of 10:30 Eastern Time, its price stood at $4,056, after plunging as low as $2,981 in recent days on some exchanges, according to Coindesk, which tracks …

Driven by higher prices and more usage, the value of cryptocurrency transactions could exceed $1 trillion this year, more than 15 times their level in 2016, a British research firm estimates. Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research in a new report pegs the value of cryptocurrency transactions in 2017’s first half at $325 …