Issuing/Originating

Square Inc.’s acquisition of Afterpay Ltd. is expected to give Square a ready-made product in the hotly competitive buy now, pay later market that it can quickly plug into its consumer and merchant applications to make it an immediate force in BNPL.  Square on Sunday announced it was acquiring Afterpay, …

NCR Corp. said it will acquire LibertyX, a cryptocurrency software provider. Its software runs on ATMs and point-of-sale systems. Terms were not disclosed. The deal is expected to close later this year.EVO Payments Inc. said it acquired Anderson Zaks Ltd., a payment gateway based in the United Kingdom. Terms were not disclosed.Paysafe Ltd. said it …

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit is betting its partnership with Marqeta Inc.to issue a tokenized virtual Google Pay card will entice consumers to use Google Pay more often for day-to-day purchases online and in-store.  The new card, announced this week, allows users to make purchases with their Google Pay balance using a …

As they have for rival Visa Inc., transaction volumes are continuing to improve for Mastercard Inc. as world commerce stages its recovery from the impact of the pandemic. “The strong momentum we started the year with accelerated this quarter,” chief executive Michael Miebach said Thursday morning during a session with …

The Zelle peer-to-peer payment network processed $120 billion on 436 million transactions in the second quarter, up 58% and 68%, respectively, year-over-year, according to network operator Early Warning Services LLC.Card-present transactions at small businesses are up 83% over the pre-Covid baseline of March 2020, according to the latest CardFlight Small Business Report. The …

As open banking continues to gain momentum, providers of the technology continue to grow their ecosystem of partners to make it easier for financial institutions to validate accounts and the availability of funds within an account. Nymbus, a provider of banking-technology solutions, has partnered with Plaid Inc. to authenticate and fund …

Nacha, the governing body for the automated clearing house system, said the ACH network processed 7.3 billion payments in the second quarter, a 10% increase from 6.6 billion payments in the same period a year ago. Particularly strong growth in business-to-business payment volume helped boost the result. Nacha said that …

An Australian Parliament committee held a hearing investigating Apple Inc.’s policies regarding access to the secure element for payment services on its smart phones, according to a ZDNet.com report. Apple argued its hardware-based interface is more secure than a software-focused one. Google, which uses host card emulation software for Google Pay, said …

American Express Co. posted second-quarter numbers Friday indicating the card giant is very nearly back to its pre-pandemic performance and reflecting a steady recovery from the travel restrictions that hampered the company for most of 2020. Driving the improved results was steady improvement in the company’s vital travel-and-entertainment business and …

The yin and yang of political, and ferociously commercial, PayPal was vividly on display with its announcement last month of a massive price hike. The e-commerce phenom attaches itself to an array of woke causes but remains a wonderfully hard-nosed commercial enterprise, keen to be fully compensated for the enormous value …