Payments - Long Reads, News, Articles & Research: Finextra

‘Tis the season for holiday scams: How to stay safe and shop smart

Dominique Dierks Senior Content Manager at Finextra

‘Tis the season for holiday scams: How to stay safe and shop smart

The holiday season brings joy, celebration and a surge in online shopping. But as consumers hunt for thoughtful gifts, the latest tech, and the best deals, scammers are also busy — making Black Friday and Christmas one of the riskiest times for fraud. And with digital commerce booming, the threat landscape is evolving faster than ever before. To u...

13 November 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

What are Faster Payments?

The UK’s Faster Payments service is back under the spotlight, with the Bank of England (BoE) recently being handed the reins of a long-overdue reform of the UK’s retail payments infrastructure – following years of faltering progress under Pay UK. The move came after Governor Andrew Bailey issued a call for urgent infrastructural modernisation in hi...

04 November 2025 /payments

The top payments stories you missed in October 2025

Dominique Dierks Senior Content Manager at Finextra

The top payments stories you missed in October 2025

Catch up on Finextra’s most-read payments stories from last month. G20's cross-border payments plan to miss 2027 deadline The G20's roadmap to improving cross-border payments was officially introduced in 2021. The G20’s Financial Stability Board (FSB) now reports that global financial institutions are set to miss the first deadline of 2027. "I...

31 October 2025 /payments

Payments through the lenses of simplicity, security, and society

Teresa Connors Contributing Editor at Finextra

Payments through the lenses of simplicity, security, and society

Everyone wants to know where the payments industry is heading. But crystal balls are misty things. Headlines like “our industry is moving at pace,” “modernise your payment systems or be left behind,” and “get on board with agentic AI” capture the mood of disruption, but they don’t tell the whole story. To cut through the noise, it helps to look at ...

30 October 2025 /payments

How Spain is quietly leading the future of payments

Jordi Nicolau Head of Payments & Consumer at CaixaBank

How Spain is quietly leading the future of payments

When it comes to fintech headlines, Spain is rarely the centre of attention. Markets like the UK, USA, or the Nordics tend to dominate the conversation around cryptocurrency, open banking, real-time payments, and digital transformation. Yet beneath the radar, Spanish banks are steadily leading the way in shaping the next generation of payments inn...

28 October 2025 /payments

Pre-payment KYP: The next frontier for cross-border payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Pre-payment KYP: The next frontier for cross-border payments

Tackling fraud and misdirected payments is a war of two fronts: it must be waged both domestically and across borders. Thus far, the fight against domestic fraud has been something of a success, with local pre-payment checks – such as the United Kingdom’s Confirmation of Payee (CoP), introduced in 2020, and Europe’s Verification of Payee (VoP), eff...

20 October 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

What is Open Finance?

On 13 October 2025, the FCA announced a partnership to accelerate the delivery of Open Finance in the UK: “We've been working with the industry to deliver Open Finance,” it said in a press release, “which will give people control over how they manage their money and plan their finances for the future.” This news came ahead of the launch of the FC...

13 October 2025 /payments

Could FX strategies be a game-changer for corporate treasurers?

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

Could FX strategies be a game-changer for corporate treasurers?

With the macroeconomic outlook seeming more unpredictable than it has in years, the foreign exchange (FX) market is experiencing considerable volatility. Shifting trade policies are proving a notable headwind – driving liquidity and working capital challenges, as well as geopolitical uncertainty. Fortunately, there are opportunities to be seized a...

06 October 2025 /payments

Hamish Monk Senior Reporter at Finextra

What is API standardisation?

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are a millennial innovation opened out to the financial sector through a series of open banking regulations – the first instalment of which, the Payment Services Directive, was introduced in 2007. APIs transport requests – in the form of data – from one system to the other, informing the provider what the...

01 October 2025 /payments

Top payments stories you missed in August 2025

Sehrish Alikhan Reporter at Finextra

Why are orchestration tools essential within today’s payments arena?

Be it small e-commerce firms, sprawling corporations, or financial institutions within open finance contexts, organisations of all stripes must at some point face the challenge of uniting innumerable payment service providers (PSPs) within a secure and seamless payments ecosystem. The most effective way to do this is by deploying orchestration too...

26 August 2025 /payments

What SoftBank’s PayPay IPO float means for embedded finance in Japan

Madhvi Sonia Head of Content at Finextra

What SoftBank’s PayPay IPO float means for embedded finance in Japan

Last week Reuters reported that SoftBank has picked investment banks Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Mizuho and Morgan Stanley to support a potential US IPO for its Japanese payments app operator, PayPay. In what could be as early as Q4’25, PayPay could raise over $2 billion from investors, but timing and the amount are subject to market conditio...

11 August 2025 /payments

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