PaymentsJournal

High-profile data breaches at major retailers exposed thousands of consumers’ personal account numbers (PANs), spurring the adoption of tokenization—a solution that replaces sensitive account data with surrogate values, protecting both consumers and merchants. As tokenization scaled, its benefits proved to extend well beyond fraud prevention. Merchants often saw meaningful lifts in authorization r...

For many small business owners, the workday doesn’t end when customers leave. It continues late into the evening—logging into multiple dashboards, exporting spreadsheets, reconciling transactions, and trying to make sense of scattered financial data. In the absence of a centralized solution, many have been forced to stitch together a patchwork of banks, fintech apps, payment processors, and accoun...

With the advent of faster payments, many financial organizations have prioritized speed over fraud detection. Consumers expect instant transactions, but banks must still protect themselves and their customers from fraud. Running fraud detection in the background—analyzing contextual signals and historical data—helps strike the right balance between speed and security. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast,...

ACH is a critical part of the U.S. payment infrastructure, driving a significant portion of transaction volumes and supporting important use cases such as supplier payments, payroll, and many others. Despite competition from newer rails that serve similar purposes, ACH continues to grow at a remarkable pace. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Radha Suvarna , Chief Product Officer of Payments at Finastr...

Credit unions have distinct hallmarks: they are not-for-profit and member-owned. Yet amid the flood of financial services companies in today’s digital landscape, these differentiators can be difficult to convey. While many younger consumers are actively seeking the kind of guidance credit unions excel at providing, they often perceive credit unions as just another bank. In a recent PaymentsJournal...

Scams have become universal, affecting all types of consumers and every kind of organization. This has placed tremendous pressure on financial services firms, which often bear the brunt of the financial losses, to develop strong fraud prevention strategies to protect their customers. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Raj Dasgupta , Vice President of Product Marketing at BioCatch, and Suzanne Sa...

Every year, billions of dollars vanish at the final step of online shopping, not because consumers change their minds, but because of hurdles within the checkout experience. Despite decades of innovation in payments technology, many shoppers still walk away when checkout feels slow or overly complex, costing businesses an estimated $260 billion annually. The answer may lie in the growing influence...

The past holiday season didn’t just test consumer wallets—it revealed how dramatically shopping behavior is evolving. As inflation-weary shoppers searched for flexibility, value, and convenience, gift cards emerged as a central tool in how consumers planned, budgeted, and ultimately gifted. From promotion hunting to increased reliance on AI, the behaviors that defined the season are poised to shap...

In just eight years, Zelle has revolutionized the way people send money. And the best is yet to come—peer-to-peer payments are expanding to small businesses and cross-border transactions, opening up a world of new possibilities.  In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Tina Shirley , Senior Director of Product for Fiserv, and Brian Riley , Co-Head of Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, discuss...

Paying a supplier is a fundamental function for businesses, yet it’s often encumbered by a complex billing cycle. When the supplier is in a different jurisdiction, this complexity skyrockets, forcing organizations to navigate foreign exchange rates, bank intermediaries, local regulations, and opaque fees—all with limited visibility into where a payment is and when it will settle. By contrast, stab...

Amid the rapid transformation of the payments industry, merchants have leveraged multiple acquirers to navigate new payment types, regulations, and consumer expectations. For example, operating across regions like the European Union often requires merchants to work with multiple acquirers to navigate the unique regulatory, payment, and consumer nuances of all 27 countries. Increasingly, however, m...

The ACH Network is reliable and ubiquitous. And over the past year, it continued to realize strong growth, both in the volume of payments and overall dollar amount. In 2025, ACH Network payment volume increased by roughly 1.6 billion, reaching a total of 35.2 billion, or an average of 141 million payments per day. In the same period, $93 trillion moved across ACH rails, up nearly $7 trillion from...

Fraud is evolving faster than ever, with AI-powered scams, deepfake-enabled identity theft, and a surge in account takeovers putting financial institutions on high alert and accountholders at risk. As the most visible safeguard of the past few decades, the humble password is coming under increasing scrutiny. In a PaymentsJournal podcast, Dr. Adam Lowe , Chief Product and Innovation Officer at Comp...

Banks are no strangers to artificial intelligence. For years, machine learning and deep learning models have quietly powered fraud detection, transaction monitoring, and risk analysis. But the industry is now approaching a more consequential shift: agentic AI—systems that don’t just analyze data, but can act on it. With that shift comes a fundamental question about how much authority banks are pre...

In today’s world, nearly anything a business or individual desires is available instantly. Yet, for most, receiving a payment still takes two to three days to clear, despite the availability of instant payments networks such as FedNow. What will it take for instant payments to reach a tipping point and become a standard expectation? In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Justin Jackson , Head of Enterprise...

The rise of artificial intelligence is coinciding with a shift toward instant payments that are increasingly difficult to stop once fraud occurs. Real-time payments put a stopwatch on fraud prevention, leaving businesses with only moments to detect and respond to suspicious activity. Striking the right balance between frictionless customer experiences and strong controls is becoming a critical cha...

Digital banking has trained consumers to expect speed, simplicity, and instant results. Yet, when those same expectations reach the commercial side of the house, many financial institutions fall short—leaving business clients stuck in slow, manual onboarding journeys that drive up costs and frustration. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Penny Townsend , Co-Founder and Chief Payments Officer at...

As payments have evolved from cash and checks to cards and digital payments, something essential has been lost: the human touch. Yet consumers are not data points—they crave a payments experience that is fast, secure, and effortless, and when they do need support, they want it to shift seamlessly into something personalized and attentive to their needs.  In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast,&#...

Running a small business is hard enough—juggling operations, customers, and cash flow. Now imagine software that not only streamlines day-to-day work but also provides the financial tools needed to grow. That’s the promise of embedded finance. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Ian Hillis , SVP of Growth at Worldpay, and Don Apgar , Director of Merchant Payments at Javelin Strategy & Researc...

Creating a synthetic identity used to be the realm of seasoned hackers, but now it can be done with a few simple prompts. Just as artificial intelligence has fueled countless business innovations, it has also been a boon for bad actors—allowing cybercriminals to commit fraud at a fraction of the cost and with greater sophistication. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Danica Kleint , Product Mark...

From transforming member experiences to building a culture of information literacy, data has become a catalyst for innovation at credit unions. New use cases are constantly emerging for organizations willing to explore them, and artificial intelligence will only increase their value. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Jeremiah Lotz , Senior Vice President of Experience Design and Enterprise Data at Vel...

The next iteration in the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has arrived, and organizations are racing to harness the potential of AI agents to create a dynamic new shopping experience. However, as powerful as agentic commerce can be, the road to adoption won’t be without hiccups—many of which will lead to a surge in disputes. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Joseph McLean , CEO and Co...

Across shopping, streaming, and social media, consumers have grown used to receiving personalized recommendations powered by artificial intelligence. While some may feel less comfortable with AI taking on a similar role in their banking experience, a hyper-personalized digital banking platform can deliver far greater value than simply suggesting the next show to binge. In a recent PaymentsJournal...

Different payment methods have gained popularity in different parts of the world. For example, buy now, pay later is widely used in Australia and the Nordics, while account-to-account payments lead the way in the Netherlands and Brazil. As commerce becomes increasingly globalized, merchants everywhere must adapt to these local payment preferences—or risk losing customers. In a PaymentsJournal Podc...

Cybercriminals have been after personal data for years, but new technology is giving them a dangerous boost. Infostealers—malware that extracts sensitive data like passwords and credit card numbers—are becoming one of today’s biggest online threats because they are easy to use and hard to spot. While conversations about online safety often peak during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, the reality is...