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.

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.

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.

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.

DLocal, provider of a cross-border payment processing service that enables online merchants to offer buyers local payment methods, has received a payment services license in the UAE, a money services business license in the Philippines and authorization to operate in Turkey.  The company holds more than 30 licenses and registrations in emerging markets. Online merchants can access over 900 local payment methods in 40+ countries.

Alipay+, a payment gateway service of Ant International, enabled the first real-world payment transaction involving smart glasses embedded with an e-wallet. The transaction occurred in Hong Kong. Meizu StarV Snap smart glasses can initiate payments with QR code scans or voice commands. Alipay+ connects more than 1.7 billion consumers to 100 million merchants through 36 e-wallet partnerships, national QR code systems and banking apps.

Visa will conduct a pilot test later this year of a USDC stablecoin-based settlement service covering licensed markets in Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East through a partnership with Yellow Card Financial.  The service will leverage the Visa Direct payment network. Visa has processed more than $225 million in USDC stablecoin payments over the last two years. Yellow Card has processed more than $6 billion in crypto payments since launching in Nigeria in 2019.

Elavon, the 6th largest merchant acquirer in the US, has expanded an existing processing deal with Wyndham Hotels to include 6,000+ franchise locations in the US and Canada.  Elavon is a subsidiary of U.S. Bank.

Asia Commercial Bank (ACB) has become the first issuer in Southeast Asia to offer a payment card tied to Visa Flexible Credential (VFC) technology. VFC allows cardholders to switch between credit and debit options using a single card. ACB’s card accounts operate on OpenWay’s Way4 issuing and acquiring digital software platform.

Unzer, a payment services provider to more than 85,000 merchants in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Luxembourg, will offer its clients access to the Wero mobile wallet payment service of the European Payments Initiative beginning in September 2025.

EXPERIAN and PLAID are collaborating to offer lenders in the US their combined expertise to deliver real-time cash flow data and credit analytics. When a consumer consents to share cash flow data from their bank account as part of a loan application, a report is generated by Plaid and delivered to Experian, which analyzes the data and returns a predictive score or set of cash flow attributes to the lender in near real time.

VERIZON will offer customers in its retail stores a Pay by Bank option through a processing deal with Trustly. The telecommunications company, which operates about 1,400 retail locations, already offers Trustly’s Pay by Bank solution for bill payments. The new service allows customers at brick-and-mortar locations to use Pay by Bank for transactions and offers discounts to those who enroll in autopay using Trustly. Trustly offers Pay by Bank services to over 9,000 merchants across more  than 30 countries in Europe and North America.