New national systems, the card networks, and blockchain operations are all piling into real-time payments. What’s going on, and why? If the travails of 2020 had any advantages, they lay in how the struggle with the pandemic offered opportunities to demonstrate the vital utility of technologies like contactless payments and …

Visa and Mastercard are the world’s premier networks for card transactions. Can they afford to rest content with that distinction? It’s safe to say that most readers of this story have spent most of their adult lives with plastic tokens branded by Visa or Mastercard in their wallet. The two …

Multiple real-time services may flourish, but don’t discount the Fed’s ability to corner volume. Over the last several decades, there has been a crescendo of interest from regulators and the industry worldwide in real-time interbank payments. Instant interbank payments displace batch automated clearing house transfers and enable new use cases, …

The pandemic is changing payments, but it’s also reworking payments strategies. Here’s how the industry will have to react in the next few years. Covid-19 has dramatically transformed daily life in many ways all too familiar by this point. While we know that the pandemic will end, the timing is …

Each year, Digital Transactions uses this space to lay out the problems impacting the payments industry. This time, the Covid-19 pandemic has inflected our coverage across a wide range of issues. The solutions will have to be far from business as usual. 2020 has been one of those years you …

Payments industry veterans Will Graylin and George Wallner launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo for OV Valet, their new company that wants to offer Superkey, a fob that uses near-field communication and magnetic secure transmission technology, to enable tap-and-pay payments.Payments-technology provider VoPay International Inc. said it is working with Visa Inc. to integrate the …

MoneyGram International Inc. reached an agreement with Lulu Money in which consumers in Hong Kong can send or receive money at any Lulu Money location and also link to the MoneyGram network.In related news, MoneyGram and PayMaya, a payments provider in the Philippines, have agreed to launch a service that will allow …

Online purchases using installment credit will total $680 billion globally in 2025, up 92% from $353 billion last year, projects Kaleido Intelligence.In related news, point-of-sale installment lender Laybuy launched a partner program to help smaller retailers offer the credit. More than 6,000 merchants offer Laybuy.MetaBank N.A., a unit of Meta Financial Group Inc., …

As workers struggle with cash-flow issues that in some cases were worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, banks and fintechs are working to get wages into employees’ hands faster—sometimes in real time. Two such developments emerged this week from Square Inc. and Immediate Solutions Inc., a company that specializes in speeding …

PayPal Holdings Inc. and Visa Inc. are adding cross-border payments to an agreement to route payments made through PayPal’s Instant Transfer Service through the Visa Direct platform. The expanded agreement will allow consumers and small businesses to send or receive money to or from a Visa card account in real-time …