Law and Regulation

Varo Bank early Tuesday announced it has become the first digital neobank to be admitted to the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network. The bank, a unit of the 7-year-old, San Francisco-based Varo Money Inc., said it will now offer payments via Zelle through its mobile app. “Adding Zelle to our product …

The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC early Tuesday issued a white paper alleging that federal regulators are effectively blocking national banks from issuing stablecoins. This is despite the agencies’ own conclusion that the banks have the authority to issue the digital currency, the paper says. The paper also follows an …

As one who has spent an entire career working with community banks, credit unions, and merchants, I can say it’s abundantly clear how they all suffer from a broken payments system, with the Fed’s automated clearing house being the lone exception. While merchants and community banks don’t share the same …

The payments platform Orum said it will rely on account-verification technology from open-banking provider MX Technologies Inc. to offer money-transfer capability targeted at fintechs.Checkout-free shopping provider Grabango said its in-store contactless checkout service is available at a Chevron U.S.A. Inc. location in California.Bluefin Payment Systems acquired TECS Payment Systems, an Austria-based omnichannel payments provider. Terms were not …

Socure Inc., a provider of digital-identity verification and fraud detection, has become the latest company to join the expanding universe of open-banking technology providers. On Tuesday, Socure announced the launch of Socure Account Intelligence, an application that verifies domestic bank-account status and ownership of the account into which funds are …

With data sharing via open-banking arrangements becoming increasingly vital in the payments business, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday released an outline of a “data-rights rule” it is preparing that would govern how consumers’ financial information is shared among players such as banks and payments companies. The proposed rule …

It was only a matter of time before the two big international card networks responded to a recent Federal Reserve requirement that issuers make at least two unrelated networks available to merchants for debit card transactions. Late Tuesday, Visa Inc.’s chief financial officer, Vasant Prabhu, said the impact of the …

BNY Mellon announced early Monday it has launched a payments platform called Vaia, which allows clients to offer real-time payments, same-day automated clearing house transfers, tokenized payments, debit cards, and payments through the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network. The nation’s 10th-largest bank by assets said the panoply of payments capabilities can …

A federal court ruling that emerged Thursday invalidated a 5-year-old rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but also has the potential to strike at the roots of the agency itself, observers say. The ruling also comes as the CFPB is growing more active in examining the payments industry. The …

The controversy regarding fraud and scams on the Zelle peer-to-peer payment network reached a new level on Thursday with a short statement from Early Warning Services LLC, the bank-owned company that operates Zelle, referring to “misleading reports of fraud and scams” on the network and “incomplete” external analysis from outside …