PaymentsJournal

The U.S. is home to 36 million small businesses—99.9% of all businesses—and roughly 11 million of their owners are already credit union members, according to Velera’s CU Growth Outlook 2026. The opportunity, then, isn’t simply to win new small business members. It’s to turn existing relationships into deeper, more valuable ones. In a PaymentsJournal Podcast, Velera’s Vice President of Marketing Carrie Stapp, and Vice President of Product Management Sheba Carnes, as well as Brian Riley, Co-Head

For years, payments have largely fallen into two camps: horizontal platforms built to serve a broad range of businesses, and vertical solutions designed around the specific needs of a particular industry. But businesses increasingly need both. They want the flexibility and scale of a horizontal platform without giving up the specialized capabilities that come with a vertical solution. That’s where diagonal thinking comes in. Rather than choosing between scale and specialization, diagonal think

The more banking moves onto a smartphone, the harder it becomes for financial institutions to create a tangible connection with their customers. Yet as more of the banking relationship becomes digital, consumers continue to seek experiences that feel personal and distinctive—from personalized products and luxury brands to rewards, upgrades, and exclusive access. That creates an interesting opportunity for the physical payment card. Far from becoming irrelevant, the card can serve as one of the

Fraudsters no longer need to reinvent their tactics from scratch. With artificial intelligence and increasingly sophisticated access to consumer data, they can test new approaches quickly, learn what works, and adapt before financial institutions have time to catch up. That speed is forcing banks and other financial institutions to rethink how they authenticate customers. One approach gaining traction is ownership authentication, a process that looks beyond whether an application’s information

The payment card was supposed to disappear. As digital wallets, embedded payments, and mobile-first experiences reshaped commerce, the physical card seemed destined to follow the path of other outdated tools. Instead, it has found a new role—not just as a simple way to pay, but as a platform of identity, access, rewards, and deeper customer engagement. According to the Federal Reserve’s 2025 Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, credit cards accounted for 35% of U.S. consumer transactions in 2024,

There is a growing disparity between hype and reality when it comes to agentic commerce. This is not so much a critique of AI agents’ capabilities, or the infrastructure that has rapidly emerged to support them, as it is an indication that this model is still in its early stages. Many merchants still associate the term “agent” with independent sales organization (ISO) reseller agents, rather than artificial intelligence. In a recent PaymentsJournal podcast, Hilla Peled, SVP of AI & Data Scienc