Russia is scheduled to begin testing its new National Payment System (NPS) with eight banks next week, and the platform is scheduled to become fully operational in the first quarter of next year.
Faster Payments, the UK payment clearing system, is planning to expand access to more payment service providers in the coming year. The organisation has set out its plans in a new Whitepaper, which explores possible cooperation with the Bank of England to develop new settlement models for non-bank payment service providers.
The FFIEC’s recently updated BSA/AML Examination Manual is emphasizing—as it has in the past—that the buck stops with issuing banks in terms of ultimate responsibility for BSA/AML compliance for prepaid access products, regardless of agreements or contracts with other players in the value chain.
Millions of dollars keep flowing into the payments industry as investors recently showed support for advanced payments cards from Dynamics Inc., Stripe’s e-commerce solutions and a digital-only Atom Bank.
The Reserve Bank of India has issued guidelines for licensing small finance banks in the private sector to, among other objectives, better meet the needs of unbanked and underbanked populations and to provide credit to small businesses, farmers and small industries.
Department store Kohl’s Corp. expects to enjoy the fruits of combining a mobile payments app with loyalty this holiday season.
Fewer than a third of banks are at the implementation stage of projects implementing the Basel intraday liquidity monitoring rules that come into force next month – and most believe that industry collaboration will be needed to achieve a successful outcome.
ICAP is combining its EBS foreign exchange and BrokerTec fixed income electronic trading platforms into one business unit. The change is“an internal management reorganisation” and the platforms will remain separate for the foreseeable future.
Holiday shoppers with PayPal accounts took to their mobile devices in droves last week, with PayPal Inc. reporting a 56 percent surge in mobile sales volume over its platform on Thanksgiving Day compared to last year and a 62 percent jump on Black Friday.
Europe’s biggest payments company is coming to the U.S. Stockholm-based e-payments provider Klarna has announced it will earmark at least $100 million for a U.S. expansion, including a new operations center in Columbus, Ohio.
SpendSmart Networks is pulling the plug on its prepaid card business, citing poor performance amid increasing regulatory pressure and associated costs.
PULSE Network LLC, a Discover Financial Services company, filed a lawsuit against Visa Inc. late last month alleging antitrust law violations it says undercut PIN debit competition. Meanwhile, Target’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit related to its 2013 data breach was denied.
Following its success during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping frenzy this year, alternative currency Bitcoin is gaining popularity and could be poised for major growth in 2015. But the currency still has a long way to go before it catches up with rivals such as PayPal, Visa and MasterCard.
Symphony Communications, a financial industry messaging service provider, has acquired a rival service provided by Markit, a financial data management provider. The move may bolster Symphony’s ability to rival more entrenched, expensive cloud-based chat services used by financial institutions.
A platform for sharing cyber-security threat intelligence among financial services companies has been launched by US post-trade utility the DTCC and non-profit security organisation FS-ISAC. Called Soltra Edge, the platform gathers data about cyber-security threats and converts it into a standardised format for sharing.
China UnionPay continues to take steps to make it easier for its customers to make payments on their mobile devices.
U.K.-based mobile money provider Monitise plc is getting a major capital infusion, landing a £49.2 million (US$77 million) investment from the trio of MasterCard, Santander Group and Telefónica.
Debate on the EU Payments Package, composed of the revised Payment Services Directive and the Regulation on Interchange Fees, recommenced in Brussels on Nov. 19. Although the two pieces of legislation are part of one “package,” they’re at different stages in the legislative process, and depending on how they progress, the transition into law could be smooth for the industry—or not.
The hotly-contested contract to provide a real-time payments system in Australia has been won by Swift, which has announced plans to develop real-time retail domestic payment solutions and compete to deploy them internationally.
While online retailers roll their Black Friday bargains over to Cyber Monday, research shows that an increasing amount of online sales are being made via smartphones and tablets, and this trend is continuing – but this does not mean smaller crowds, as consumers are also switching to ‘click & collect’ services.
Skrill Group, a global provider of online payment technologies to merchants and consumers, has added significant reach to its online payment voucher provider paysafecard with the acquisition of Ukash.
Holiday shopping over the Thanksgiving weekend was slightly lower than the previous year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation.
UGO Wallet, an NFC mobile wallet developed by UGO Mobile Solutions and Canadian banks President’s Choice Financial and TD Bank Group, launched last week and is available to customers of Canada’s three largest wireless carriers.
Is it a surprise to anyone in the payments industry that the word “contactless” was a finalist this year as Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year?
Barclays has launched a new video banking service on smartphone, tablet and computer, which it says will allow customers to have face to face conversations with the bank anytime, anywhere, without having to visit a branch.
A pan-African vision has inspired the African Stock Exchange, which has ambitious plans to tap the potential of the continent using hosted technology and a secure base in Mauritius.
Despite tensions between Russia and NATO over the situation in east Ukraine, the underlying internationalisation and reform agenda in Moscow has not changed, according to Russian broker BCS.
Monitise plans to raise £49.2 million through extensions of its relationships with Santander, Telefónica and MasterCard. The money raised will be used to ‘support the development and accelerated roll-out of its global platform capabilities’.
The European Payments Council has set out new requirements under the Single Euro Payment Area Credit Transfer and Direct Debit schemes, including changes to the time cycle, business to business rulebooks and the process for SDD collection, following SEPA implementation in August.
Payments industry participants are getting a taste of what compliance might be like under its new regulator the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR).
Gift card exchange Cardpool is partnering with LevelUp to make the most coveted gift—the gift card—more valuable by enabling LevelUp users to exchange unused and partially used gift cards for LevelUp credits at more than 14,000 participating merchants.
The recent launch of the Apple Pay wallet app on the latest iterations of iPhone handsets has created a flurry of activity among m-payments providers trying to attract as many consumers as they can to their solutions.
Despite the G20 plans put in place since the financial crisis, CCPs are still vulnerable to unforeseen risks and could put the whole financial system in jeopardy in the event of a catastrophic default, according to senior financial services executives speaking in London today.
CARD.com, a mobile-focused financial product provider, has hired David Wolfe as senior vice president of technology.
Card marketing and production service provider Arroweye Solutions has been selected by American Banker as one of the Top 100 worldwide technology providers to the financial services industry.
Consumer Reports recently published a Naughty and Nice List based on company practices and policies. Discover made the Nice list by becoming the first major credit-card issuer to provide free FICO scores from TransUnion on monthly statements of qualifying cardholders.
Fiserv Inc., a Brookfield, Wis.-based financial services technology provider, has named Kevin Schultz group president.
Robert P. Zinn, partner and a firm-wide leader of K&L Gates’ global corporate and transactional practice, has been named one of Global M&A Network’s Top 50 North American M&A Lawyers, part of the Top 50 Americas Dealmakers List.
The Members Group, a Des Moines, Iowa-based payments processor, has added four client business executives, Mark Landry, Yvonne Stelpflug, Ryan Talley and Julie Willse, to its client development team.
Online payment voucher provider and member of the international Skrill Group paysafecard has appointed Berny Sagmeister vice president of new business.
