Swift announced today that the European Payment Council's awkwardly named One-Leg-Out Instant Credit Transfer scheme (OCT Inst) went live this week and it enables payments to and from Europe to be processed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
More positive signs for fintech as spend management unicorn Ramp closed another large funding round.
The $150 million was officially called a Series D extension, but it comes at a $7.65 billion valuation, a significant improvement over the $300 million raised for the initial Series D, which was at $5.8 billion.
We are moving to a world of instant payments but how we get there is still uncertain.
A blockchain-based payments system designed for central banks has just completed its first live transactions with the Bank of England. Created by Fnality, the system processed live payments from member banks, Lloyds, Santander and UBS.
There are big changes coming to the world of interchange. Today, in a historic settlement, Visa and Mastercard have agreed to cap card interchange fees as they seek to end a legal fight that has spanned almost two decades.
As the price of bitcoin goes, so goes Coinbase.
Bitcoin hit an all-time high in the first quarter, and Coinbase reported its best-ever results. The company made $1.18 billion in net income on total revenue of $1.64 billion. Those are impressive numbers, any way you look at them.
It was almost a year ago when FIS acquired embedded finance startup Bond. CEO Roy Ng and much of the team stayed on at FIS.
Today, we learned about the fruits of this integration. FIS has announced the launch of Atelio by FIS, its new embedded finance platform.
In June of last year, Robinhood announced it was acquiring the credit card startup X1.
Today, we learned about the fruits of that transaction: a new Gold Card from Robinhood.
We have been following the recent developments in real-time payments with some interest. While adoption is increasing it is not going as fast as many industry observers had hoped.
If you are not paying attention to Nubank, it is time you did.
Last week the Latin American fintech leader released their Q4 and full-year earnings and it was another very solid report.
Last month, it was Chase, this month, it is PayPal launching a new ad business.
PayPal has hired Uber's former head of advertising to run PayPal Ads, the new division that will be selling targeted ads based on its customer data.