Digital Payments in Emerging Economies

Americans’ expectations about their ability to switch jobs is at an all-time low. That’s according to the latest edition of The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data Survey of ...

The latest labor market figures delivered an unexpected turn, with payrolls shrinking in February and the unemployment rate ticking higher, raising new questions about whether consumer confidence and spending power ...

Companies in the S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector are lagging behind other sectors in earnings due tohigh costs and soft demand, Bloomberg reported Friday (March 6). While 73% of companies across ...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is developing a way to refund to importers the money they paid under tariffs that were later struck down by the Supreme Court, Reuters reported Friday (March 6). A CBP official ...

Wholesale used vehicle prices increased by 4% year over year in February, driven by warmer weather and larger-than-usual tax refunds, Cox Automotive reported Friday (March 6). The company’s Manheim Used Vehicle ...

The construction industry builds skylines, bridges and critical infrastructure, yet its own critical financial infrastructure often runs on outdated payment practices. Findings in the February 2026 edition of the B2B and ...

Corporate earnings releases and conference calls often serve as a real-time test of economic narratives. Management observations offer insight into how consumers behave at the checkout counter and whether they are ...

Indian payments platform PhonePe reportedly hopes to go public at a valuation of $9 billion to $10.5 billion. This indicates that the Walmart-backed company will raise around $900 million to $1.05 ...

Watch more: Need to Know With North’s Suril Patel When merchants viewed payments solely through the lens of cost, they typically looked for as little cost as possible. But that one-dimensional calculus ...

There’s an affordability crisis rocking households in the United States. Housing, insurance, healthcare, childcare, transportation and other categories once expected to scale gradually with income have instead shifted upward in step ...

A top Federal Reserve official said he sees an increasing divide between low-income and high-income households. John C. Williams, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, signaled ...

Ripple Payments now allows customers to collect, hold, exchange and payout in both fiat and stablecoins. The platform also enables customers to provision named virtual accounts and wallets, automate collection flows, ...

PayPay reportedly hopes to raise up to $1.1 billion when it goes public. That’s according to a report Tuesday (March 3) from Bloomberg News, which says it would be the largest ever initial public ...

As the PYMNTS audience saw in Monday’s newsletter (March 2) there’s some wisdom to be gleaned from crowds. The occasion was the launch of the PYMNTS Consumer Expectations Index, a new ...

Watch more: What’s Next in Payments With Paymentus’ Nicole Haskins The FinTech landscape has overindexed on innovation. But in an operational landscape defined by automation, predictive analytics, and invisible payments, the ...

In March 2020, government officials and epidemiologists were telling Americans to brace for a two-month shutdown. PYMNTS Intelligence went into the field and asked 1,923 consumers directly what they thought. ...

Financial stress is no longer just shaping what Americans buy. It is reshaping how they pay. That was the central insight of “Consumer Financial Stress Is Changing the Rules of Shopping ...

Interoperability in crypto payments has long been discussed as a technical aspiration. Over the past several months, it has started to look more like a commercial necessity. As stablecoins and digital ...

While everyone is worried about AI’s ability to write everything from term papers to publication-ready journalism, it was a human writing about AI that rocked the markets. But as with ...

Small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are approaching a practical turning point in how they pay. Cash and checks still play an outsized role in day-to-day operations, especially for supplier and ...

Tuesday (Feb. 24) marked a potentially seismic day in the payments industry. Rumors of Stripe’s interest in PayPal emerged after hours on Tuesday, initially reported by the likes of Bloomberg, with ...

A White House economist said a report that warned of potential risks to the economy posed by artificial intelligence (AI) “violates some of the basic accounting in economics,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday ...

Slight improvements in consumers’ expectations for business conditions, labor market conditions and incomes drove a turnaround in consumer confidence in February, The Conference Board said Tuesday (Feb. 24). The organization’s Consumer Confidence ...

Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook said in a Tuesday (Feb. 24) speech that rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) could pose new challenges for the central bank’s traditional tools as ...

Home Depot is learning to grow even when housing does not. The retailer on Tuesday (Feb. 24) reported fourth-quarter 2025 adjusted earnings per share of $2.72, comfortably ahead of Wall Street’s ...

PayPal Holdings has met with banks at a time when it is seeing unsolicited interest from would-be buyers, Bloomberg reported Monday (Feb. 23), citing unnamed sources. The company is drawing takeover ...

The global tariff environment has shown CFOs and procurement leaders that operational assumptions can be proven wrong at the drop of a hat. And the Supreme Court’s Friday (Feb. 20) 6–3 ...

A leading Federal Reserve official says that employment in the U.S. likely declined last year. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showing that job creation dropped to an average of 15,000 new positions ...

Transit systems around the world are moving away from cash and paper tickets. Instead, they are moving toward modernized payments tied to bank-issued contactless cards and digital payments that let riders ...

Consumers continue to shoulder the expansion of the U.S. economy, even as late-year data reveal a more deliberate spending posture and a softer pace of overall growth. Income Growth Moderates as ...

Two days after the Supreme Court’s tariff decision, the headline is no longer simply that the justices drew a line on presidential authority. The immediate question for importers and for ...

Uncertainty is no longer a background condition for middle-market firms. It is now a measurable cost center. That was the central theme of “How Business Uncertainty Is Forcing a New CFO ...

Watch more: The Digital Shift With Paysafe’s Bruce Lowthers Somewhere between the first ticket purchase and the final prop bet, $20.2 billion changed hands. That was the projected spending around this year’s ...

This time each year, millions of consumers in the United States tell themselves comforting but misleading stories about their tax refunds. One story is that the check from the U.S. Treasury ...

Banks in the U.K. are reportedly working to create their alternative to Visa and Mastercard. Executives from the country’s banking giants will meet this week on the project, driven by fears ...

Visa formed a new sub-region that includes Egypt, Libya and Sudan, saying the move will advance its strategic growth plans in the wider North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. The new ...

Latin America’s digital habits are no longer confined to retail shopping or person-to-person transfers. They are directly influencing how smaller firms  invoice, get paid, stock shelves and bridge payroll gaps. PYMNTS ...

If one theme connected fourth-quarter earnings calls across consumer packaged goods companies and discretionary brands, such as toymakers, it was the emergence of a consumer economy defined by prioritization rather ...

The latest inflation data released Friday (Feb 13) point to a continued easing of price pressures, particularly in categories that define household necessity rather than discretionary spending, offering consumers incremental ...

Stablecoins promise to help businesses move money faster, cheaper and more transparently. But their path to legitimization and institutional adoption has been anything but fast, cheap or even transparent. Still, over the ...

The consumer in the United States is no longer one market. It’s two. And corporate earnings calls are increasingly where the split shows up first. On one side are premium brands ...

Japan-based PayPay filed for a U.S. initial public offering Thursday (Feb. 12), saying it aims to continue expanding the capabilities of its digital finance platform. In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company did ...

Foreign exporters paid a growing share of the cost of new tariffs in 2025, though U.S. importers continued to pay for most of that cost, the Federal Reserve Bank of New ...

Payment/financial services firm Fiserv has debuted a real-time cash-settlement platform for digital asset companies. The INDX platform, announced Thursday (Feb. 12), is designed to help digital asset companies securely store and ...

This edition of “The Prompt Economy™ Tracker®” examines how tokenization is emerging as the foundational trust layer for agentic AI and the next generation of digital commerce. Through the narrative persona of ...