The Federal Reserve, which is taking industry comments on its upcoming FedNow real-time payments network until Nov. 7, said common questions so far involve pricing and the scope of the service. The first question can’t be answered yet, and the second touches on services that will be designed by financial institutions building on top …

Global Payments Inc. completed its $21.5 billion all-stock merger with payment processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS). The deal cleared its last major hurdle when European Union antitrust regulators said they had no competition concerns, Reuters reported Tuesday. The merged company serves 3.5 million merchant locations and 1,300 financial institutions in more than 100 …

Bank of America Corp. says it has 8 million active users of the bank-backed Zelle person-to-person payment service and that it handled 69 million Zelle transactions in the second quarter, nearly double the 35.2 million transactions a year earlier. BofA had 5.4 million Zelle users in the 2019 first quarter. …

Mastercard Inc. completed its acquisition of Transfast, a cross-border payments specialist. Terms were not disclosed. Transfast provides B2B and person-to-person payment services through a network it says covers more than 125 countries and includes direct integrations with more than 300 banks and other financial institutions. The company also supports Mastercard …

Automatic Labs Inc., a unit of SiriusXM, announced its Connected Car Assistant is available at major retailers nationwide for $99.99. The product, which consists of an app and an adapter, allows drivers to pay road tolls, among other connected-car functions. Revel Systems Inc. completed the installation of its cloud-based iPad …

A report that Bank of America Corp. might not renew its joint merchant-acquiring venture with leading payment processor First Data Corp. left observers wondering Thursday what the break-up of one of the payments industry’s biggest players would mean for the companies involved, and the wider industry. The joint venture, Bank …

Mobile-authentication technology provider Payfone Inc. raised $24 million in a funding round led by credit-reporting agency TransUnion with participation from previous investor Synchrony Financial and two institutional investors. TransUnion said it will integrate Payfone’s Trust Platform and Trust Score with its identity products, and become Payfone’s primary partner for regulated …

Checkbook, a provider of digital-check technology, introduced Instant Pay, a service that lets businesses push funds into consumer and corporate bank accounts using Visa Direct, Visa Inc.’s push-payments network. Checkbook’s founder is PJ Gupta, former chief network architect at Visa. First American Payment Systems LP said it now offers Idealpos’s …

This one wasn’t hard to predict. Observers said Fiserv Inc.’s $22 billion bid for mega-processor First Data Corp. in January would trigger a wave of mergers in the payments industry—and sure enough, along came Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on March 18 with a $43-billion cash-and-stock deal to acquire …

Close observers of the payment-processing industry predicted Fiserv Inc. would start a merger wave when it announced its $22 billion deal to acquire First Data Corp. in January. That prophecy seems to have come true with the even bigger $43 billion FIS-Worldpay merger announced Monday, and the consolidation wave probably hasn’t …