Industry News

PAYFINIA, which offers community financial institutions its Instant Payment Xchange platform for real-time money movement, will provide its customers access to the Paze digital wallet ecommerce checkout service from
Early Warning Services. The digital wallet service from Payfinia will provide a computing layer to protect users’ data supplied by financial institutions. Star One CU is the first Payfinia customer
to offer Paze to its members.

STMICROELECTRONICS has launched STPay-Topaz-2, a system on a chip for contactless payment cards. Card manufacturers can consolidate the largest set of payment apps on a single part number. An autotuning capability provides consistent performance across terminals to ensure cardholders receive a successful tap. Samples are available and production is already underway.

PREZZEE’S global egift card marketplace will be available to Lyft ride-hailing drivers. Prepaid cards from national brands will be provided as mobile-friendly rewards for Lyft drivers. The rewards will be integrated with Lyft’s existing loyalty and reward program. Prezzee has sold 140 million prepaid cards globally.

PAYJUNCTION, which processes more than $12 billion in card payments annually, has integrated with Twillo’s customer engagement platform. Merchants will be able to deploy Twillo interactive voice response technology to securely process payments over the phone, eliminating manual processing.

VENMO, a money movement app owned by PayPal, is marketing a co-branded Mastercard debit card to students at
Big 12 Conference universities. Card designs will be customized for each school. The Venmo Debit Mastercard is issued by The Bancorp Bank.

FNBO (First National Bank of Omaha) has launched a new Wawa Mastercard credit that offers savings and perks to the retailer's customers based on spending for fuel and in-store purchases. New cardholders will receive discounts of 50 cents per gallon of gas as a statement credit for the first 30 days. They get 3X points for in-store spending.

Kort Payments and Tilled have formed a partnership. Tilled offers PayFac as a Service technology. Kort is an omnichannel payment processor that also handles compliance and risk management. The companies will pursue business opportunities with independent software vendors and SaaS platforms in the US and Canada. Kort recently purchased the direct marketing business of Paysafe.

WORLDPAY has added domestic acquiring capabilities in Thailand. It will offer merchants alternative payment methods including Line Pay, TrueMoney and PromptPay as well as provide settlement in Thai baht. Other countries in the Asia-Pacific region in which Worldpay has domestic acquiring businesses are Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand and South Korea.

EASTERN BANK in Bangladesh has issued a metal Elite Mastercard credit card. In-store cardholder authentication is provided by an embedded fingerprint sensor from Idex Biometrics. The card is manufactured in Korea by Kona I. Technology from Infineon enables biometric credentials to be recorded, processed, matched and stored on the secure element in the card that connects to the sensor. Cardholders will receive an at-home authentication kit to handle fingerprint enrollment.

Pay4You, a self-service payment portal for corporations, has integrated with Mastercard’s Virtual Card Network technology. The collaboration is aimed at capturing the approximately 20% of corporate payments that are not typically managed by a procurement process. Usually those  purchases are settled as account-to-account payments. Johanna Waara is SVP, Head of Corporate Solutions, Europe at Mastercard, johanna.waara@mastercard.com, www.mastercard.com.

Curve, provider of an app that lets six million consumers in the UK and EEA link their credit cards and debit cards in a digital Curve Wallet, will use the Thales D1 platform to offer in-store NFC-based payments to cardholders that had previously been limited to contactless payments from Apple or Android wallets.

Stripe will offer its merchants in France and Germany the open banking-based account-to-account payment service of TrueLayer. Germany and France, Europe’s two largest economies, are TrueLayer’s top markets outside of the UK. Last year, TrueLayer processed $2.34 billion in A2A payments in France and $1.64 billion in Germany.

INET, a payment service provider in Saudi Arabia, will deploy and manage ACI Worldwide’s Postilion acquiring platform to provide POS infrastructure directly to banks and merchants. Currently, iNet processes more than five million transactions a day. In addition to card payments, the Postilion platform facilitates softPOS, QR code, link-based and digital wallet payments.

EverC, a risk management company serving clients in ecommerce, has launched Instant Onboarding, a product that assesses the risk associated with adding new merchants and handles compliance requirements. Instant Onboarding scans websites in real time to map a merchant’s online presence, classifies risk and detects fake storefronts.

Nuvei, which provides local acquiring in 50 markets, has launched a direct acquiring business in Canada. The company offers merchants access to 720 alternative payment methods. Nuvei is owned by private equity firm Advent International. Scotiabank has been a BIN provider to Nuvei.

Entrust's Digital Card Solution platform will be used by CreditBank PNG (CBP) in Papua New Guinea to tokenize Visa cards. The bank’s mobile app, which features a built-in payment wallet, will be used to initiate contactless purchases.

Affirm will offer its pay-over-time options to US-based developer customers of video game commerce company Xsolla for payments of $50 or more. The companies will add Canada and the UK by yearend 2025.

ValidFi’s predictive bank account and payment intelligence technology will be offered to credit unions by Velero, a credit union services organization. The technology isupports new account onboarding and application processes.

CAIXABANK is the first financial institution in Spain to offer Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhone. Through its Comercia Global Payments partnership with US-based Global Payments, CaixaBank connects to 805,000 POS terminals in Spain.

Mastercard is offering UK-based financial institutions access to its account-to-account switching technology to experiment with new features for person-to-person, person-to-merchant, business-to-business and other payments tied to traditional retail and digital asset use cases.

Mastercard plans to make Fiserv’s upcoming FIUSD stablecoin, a programmable blockchain-based token, available on the Mastercard global network that connects 150 million merchants.  The Mastercard Multi-Token Network will connect with Fiserv’s Digital Asset Platform. The partners expect to offer merchants FIUSD as a settlement option. The companies will also support Mastercard branded stablecoin-powered payment cards.

RS2, provider of API-first, cloud-native payment processing technology for card issuing and merchant acquiring, will incorporate Visa’s front-end authorization services into its technology stack. Implementations are underway in Europe and Latin America.

Fiserv will develop and launch FIUSD, a US dollar-denominated stablecoin and then integrate it with PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin. The companies are working to develop use cases which could include cross-border and merchant transactions and payouts.

Klarna’s pay in 4 payment offer, which gives consumers four fixed payments for purchase over $35, has been integrated with Google Pay.

Fico will launch Fico Score 10 BNPL and Fico Score 10 T BNPL credit scores that incorporate Buy Now, Pay Later data later this year. Initially, the new scores will be offered to lenders with existing Fico scores at no additional fee.