Payments UK succeeds the Payments Council, which oversaw the successful roll out of mobile payments tool Paym, the Current Account Switch Service and Faster Payments. However a bungled attempt to abolish cheques prompted the government to move to rein in the self-governing body.

In its new role, Payments UK says it will work closely with the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) in its remit to promote competition and innovation across the sector.

 Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ: FISV), a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, today announced that four of its clients received recognition at the Retail Banker International Awards 2015  for initiatives executed in conjunction with FISERV. The successful banks and their winning categories include: Westpac Banking Corporation for IT Innovation of the Year, HSBC Mexico for Latin American Retail Bank of the Year and PNC Bank, N.A.for Product Innovation of the Year.

Deutsche Boerse (DBAG) is in talks with Swiss Six Group to buy the remaining stakes in their joint ventures Stoxx and Indexium for 650 million Swiss francs ($692 million). The German exchange operator owns 50.1 percent of Stoxx AG and 49.9 percent of Indexium AG. 

When banks outsource their Issuing Processing, they rely on the expertise of their technology partner in payments as well as technical performance.

Barclaycard is to roll out a range of wearable payment devices that can be used to make ‘touch and go’ contactless payments across the UK, following a successful launch of its bPay band last year. Following the successful launch of its bPay band last year, Barclaycard unveils three new wearable payment devices – a wristband, fob and sticker. 

Western Union is to suspend its money transfer operations in Greece as the crisis-wracked country reels from an overnight Government decision to shut all banks and the stock market for six business days and impose restrictions on cash machine withdrawals.

Euroclear Bank, the Brussels-based international central securities depository (ICSD), and China Construction Bank (CCB) have today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to further develop the offshore Renminbi (RMB) capital market. 

CCB Chairman Wang Hongzhang, Euroclear group Chairman Marc Antoine Autheman, and Euroclear Chief Technology and Services Officer Lieve Mostrey attended the signing ceremony, joined by the Prime Minister of the  People’s Republic of China, Li Keqiang, and the Belgian Prime Minister, Charles Michel. 

Thirty six fintech startups in France have banded together in a bid to foster a national ecosystem for innovation in financial services.

 Although 73 percent of respondents to a recent Reval survey of more than 200 finance professionals report that they have already centralized control in payments management, 70 percent indicate they will centralize further in 2015.

For a technology still searching for dominance, wallets have come an awful long way. It wasn’t actually long after the birth of the internet, that the notion of a digital wallet, where consumers store and spend money online, emerged. Many forget that the pioneer electronic wallets of the mid-nineties were desktop software.  And since PayPal launched and Amazon patented stored-card, one-click payments, our biggest technology companies have tried to innovate by finding new ways to optimise offline payment mechanisms for a digital world.