Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—and some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, says …

Close observers of the payments business may have noticed lately that while Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have failed to live up to their promises, some pretty big and important players are nonetheless climbing on the blockchain bandwagon. Perhaps the most prominent of these arrivistes is, of course, Facebook. The social-media …

With the popularity of sharing-economy models, payments have become infinitely more complex. Sharing platforms certainly provide more value to consumers than pure-play, single-merchant-owned e-commerce sites, but they come with more challenges.  By 2021, the platform economy will welcome over 86 million users. That means that all over the world, 86 …

Banks have closed thousands of branches in recent years, hitting rural America especially hard and leaving retail ATMs, prepaid cards, and services from non-bank providers to fill the void, according to a new Federal Reserve report. The “Perspectives from Main Street: Bank Branch Access in Rural Communities” report released Monday …

Sitting in a meeting in New York City, Clay Wilkes put his company’s latest innovation to the test. “We onboarded a company, funded the master funding account, created an individual account, and moved funds from the master funding account, and bought a gift card on Amazon,” he recalls. “Someone in …

The major payment card networks have long since come to terms with PayPal Holdings Inc., and now they’re finding ways to put that newfound friendship to use in burnishing their brands with cardholders. The latest example surfaced Monday with an announcement from Discover Financial Services that Discover cardholders can use …

In recent years, independent sales organizations and payment processors have generated plenty of lucrative business by working with software developers and marketers—businesses usually known as independent software vendors, or ISVs. But now a report indicates the software market is getting increasingly crowded, a development ISVs fear is pressuring prices. It’s …

The trend toward faster payments involves several dimensions, one of which is faster card delivery to a wide array of sponsors and users who until now had little or no access to cards branded by a global network. Galileo Financial Technologies Inc. said Thursday it’s offering that capability with an …

A leading credit-union service organization reported Wednesday that it has distributed half a million contactless payment cards through some of its members, and Mastercard Inc. has paired up with a French investment firm with an eye on bringing new fare technology to mass-transit systems. St. Petersburg, Fla.-based PSCU says it …

Confirming rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into issues involving debit card transaction routing, Visa Inc. late last week reported the Federal Trade Commission has asked it to voluntarily provide information about its routing practices. In a brief notice in its fiscal 2019 report to the Securities and …