Per Bloomberg, discussions are still at an early stage and there is no certainty a deal will happen. Both companies declined to comment.

Shortly after, PayPal shares rose 6.7% to $47.02 in New York on Tuesday. That gives the company a market value of about $43.3 billion.

Stripe, which is still privately held, recently confirmed a $159 billion valuation in an employee tender offer. The company was founded by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison. It has grown into one of the most valuable financial technology firms in the world.

Speaking this week, Patrick Collison said: “PayPal has had, obviously, a tough time over the past few years and the landscape has changed quite a bit with Apple Pay and Google Pay and everything like that. I can’t talk about any, you know, M&A hypotheticals but they’ve definitely had a tough time.”

PayPal was founded in the late 1990s and helped build early online payments. In recent years, however, it has faced slower growth.

Digital wallets such as Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Pay have taken market share. The company’s fourth-quarter revenue and profit fell short of analysts’ estimates. Payment volumes have also slowed.

At the same time, PayPal is changing its leadership. Enrique Lores will become president and chief executive on March 1, replacing Alex Chriss, who was removed earlier this month. David Dorman has been appointed board chair.

Stripe, meanwhile, has continued to expand. The company processed $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025. It has also secured a US national bank trust charter for its stablecoin subsidiary, Bridge, showing plans to strengthen its role in regulated digital payments.

If the acquisition of PayPal by Stripe proceeds, the transaction could rank among the largest deals in the financial technology sector.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, the complaint goes beyond intellectual property theft as Fintiv claims that Apple engaged in corporate racketeering, deliberately lifting confidential innovations from CorFire, a mobile wallet solutions provider Fintiv acquired in 2014. 

According to the lawsuit, Apple breached nondisclosure agreements and also recruited CorFire staff to facilitate the development of Apple Pay, which was launched globally in 2014.

The issue dates back to 2011 and 2012, when Apple allegedly held a series of meetings with CorFire and entered into non-disclosure agreements to explore licensing discussions. 

Rather than formalise a deal, Apple is accused of using those sessions to extract technical knowledge and later build its own product without compensation or credit.

“This is a case of corporate theft and racketeering of monumental proportions,” the suit reads. “Apple has generated billions of dollars in revenue without paying Fintiv a single penny.”

Fintiv’s legal team, led by veteran lawyer Marc Kasowitz, isn’t pulling any punches. In a statement accompanying the filing, Kasowitz declared: “This is one of the most egregious examples of corporate malfeasance I’ve seen in 45 years of legal practice.”

The lawsuit alleges violations of both federal and state-level statutes, including the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, Georgia’s state equivalent of the RICO statute, the Defend Trade Secrets Act, and Georgia’s Trade Secret Act. Apple stands as the sole defendant in the case.

A key element of Fintiv’s argument is that Apple formed what it calls an “association-in-fact enterprise” with top-tier banks and credit card companies, including JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, to profit off the stolen technology. 

Fintiv insists these institutions have benefitted from Apple Pay transaction fees while being part of an informal commercial ecosystem rooted in misappropriated technology.

CorFire, originally based in Alpharetta, Georgia, developed mobile wallet infrastructure long before Apple’s first foray into the space. The lawsuit asserts that the similarities between CorFire’s proprietary solutions and the structure of Apple Pay are not coincidental, but the result of intentional reverse engineering of CorFire’s work.

Again, this new filing follows a separate legal setback for Fintiv. On August 4, a federal judge in Austin, Texas, dismissed a related patent infringement case Fintiv had filed against Apple. Fintiv has indicated plans to appeal that decision but appears to be moving its focus to the Georgia court, where CorFire’s legacy and intellectual property were originally based.

While Apple has yet to issue a public response, the case is already drawing attention due to its potential financial and reputational implications. Apple Pay remains a central component of the company’s services division, which has become a major revenue stream.

The lawsuit is registered as Fintiv Inc v Apple Inc, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia, No. 25-04413.

This case points to a more serious legal confrontation over how tech giants interact with smaller firms, especially in early-stage collaborations that never formalise into partnerships. 

Fintiv says Apple has followed this same pattern in other disputes, pointing to ongoing claims involving Masimo and Valencell, whose health-tracking technologies allegedly influenced the development of the Apple Watch.

As e-commerce surges and mobile payment adoption rises across the continent, businesses are searching for unified solutions that streamline operations while enhancing customer experiences.

For businesses looking to turn their payment systems from an operational necessity into a strategic asset, one company offers a compelling path forward.

With its sector-specific approach to payment orchestration, Zest, the fintech subsidiary of Stanbic IBTC Holdings, is positioning itself as a crucial partner for businesses seeking growth in Africa’s digital economy.

At its core, Zest offers something desperately needed in Africa’s diverse payment ecosystem: unification. Through sophisticated payment orchestration, their flagship platform, a payment gateway, brings multiple payment capabilities like cards, mobile money, bank transfers, and QR codes, into a single, comprehensive business dashboard.

This consolidation eliminates the headaches of managing separate systems while providing businesses with powerful tools: aggregator capabilities for multi-location collections, real-time reporting, instant settlements, reduced payment failures, and valuable customer insights that drive strategic decisions.

“Businesses today don’t just need to accept payments, they need to orchestrate experiences that are fast, seamless, and scalable,” explains Stanley Jacob, CEO of Zest.

Industry-Specific Solutions

Beyond the plug and play payment gateway, what truly sets Zest apart is its commitment to sector-led customization. Rather than offering one-size-fits-all solutions, the fintech delivers customizations of its platform to address industry-specific challenges.

One energy sector client now manages over 100 gas stations nationwide with real-time transaction monitoring against available inventory.

Additionally, Zest powers the client’s card-based loyalty system and pre-funding capabilities—a comprehensive solution that addresses multiple business needs simultaneously.

In another example, a major ports industry player benefits from custom-fitted payment collection infrastructure designed specifically for its complex operational requirements.

Empowering businesses of all sizes

While large corporations benefit from Zest’s enterprise-level customizations, smaller businesses aren’t left behind. The platform offers multi-rail payment checkout systems and free customizable storefronts embedded in its business dashboard.

With some of the most competitive pricing across different payment rails; cards, account-based transactions, USSD, QR codes, Apple Pay, and Google Pay, Zest enables even small merchants to offer customers multiple payment options. The platform’s bank-agnostic nature allows merchants to receive settlements in any bank of their choice.

“For Africa’s SMEs and corporates, orchestrated payments are no longer a nice-to-have, they are survival infrastructure,” emphasizes Ifeoluwa Adekunle-Yusuf, VP of Products and Engineering at Zest.

With digital payments in Africa projected to exceed $40 billion in annual revenue by 2025 according to McKinsey, and mobile money penetration now reaching 46% across the continent, businesses need reliable payment partners who understand the unique challenges and opportunities of the African market.

Zest’s seamless architecture ensures that businesses of all types—from small retailers and educators to artisans and service providers—can deliver professional, reliable payment experiences that power sustainable growth.

As African businesses continue their digital transformation journey, payment orchestration platforms like Zest will play an increasingly vital role in determining which companies thrive in the digital economy and which get left behind.

Smart businesses who are looking to grow more efficiently can get started with Zest, click here.

This will be because they are using Windows-based terminals, but it’s not clear either how widespread this issue is, nor why it isn’t affecting all users.

In other words, Apply Pay terminals worldwide have now been included in the list of the vast majority of corporate IT worldwide struggling on Friday morning, with things as mundane as point-of-purchase, and as complex as flight management not working because of a bad Windows security patch by security firm CrowdStrike.

While the failure is confined to Windows systems, it’s significantly worse than previous Microsoft outages, because of the scale. American Airlines, Delta, and United, each grounded all aircraft, according to BBC News, TV stations including MTV, VH1, CMT, Sky News, and ABC News Australia went off air.

The outage was caused by a software update by security firm Crowdstrike. The company has issued a brief statement saying that it was one issue in an update, and that “this is not a security incident or cyberattack.”

“CrowdStrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts,” continues the statement. “Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted.”

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” says the company.

Crowdstrike has not given a timescale for when the fix will be adequately rolled out worldwide. At present, the issue is continuing, and at time of writing, Apple Pay has been seeing a spike in outages, presumably because of it.

This ends a four-year investigation by the European Commission into Apple unfairly blocking competition with its Apple Pay service.

NFC, or Near-Field Communication, is a technology that allows nearby devices to communicate. It’s what makes contactless payments, like tapping your phone to pay at a store, possible. Until now, Apple only allowed its own Apple Pay to use this technology on iPhones.

The investigation, which began in June 2020, looked into Apple’s control over NFC technology, to find out if it was limiting competition. In May 2022, the Commission found that Apple was indeed using its position to keep competitors out, which reduced choices for consumers and limited innovation.

In response to these findings, Apple promised to allow other mobile wallet apps now access the NFC technology without having to use Apple Pay or Apple Wallet. 

This will be done through something called Host Card Emulation (HCE), which allows payment information to be stored and transactions to be completed securely without relying on Apple’s own systems.

The tech giant also agreed to follow fair and transparent procedures for granting NFC access to other developers. This means any developer who wants to create a mobile wallet app will have the same opportunities to use the NFC technology. 

Again, users will be able to set their preferred mobile wallet app as the default for payments, making it just as easy to use as Apple Pay.

To ensure Apple follows through on these promises, an independent trustee will monitor the company’s actions. There will also be a system in place to resolve any disputes quickly. These commitments will apply to all users in the European Economic Area (EEA) and will remain in effect for ten years.

European Commission Executive Vice-President Margrethe Vestager said this agreement opens up competition in a key sector and prevents Apple from excluding other mobile wallets from the iPhone’s space. She noted that the changes would benefit both consumers and developers by increasing choice and facilitating innovation.

This move is expected to comply with the upcoming Digital Markets Act, which aims to prevent tech giants from blocking competitors from key technologies.

iPhone users in the EEA will soon have more options for contactless payments. This is a win for consumers, who will benefit from more choices and potentially better services, and for developers, who will now have a fair chance to compete in the market.

Retailers have no choice but to keep pace with rapidly evolving tender types that bring with them massive cost and complexity considerations and most importantly, added security and compliance risk.

While this is certainly true for tier one or enterprise retailers, mid-market retailers often don’t have entire departments dedicated to security and compliance adding to the pressure, because while they may not be as big with as many resources as the enterprise retailers, they are often competing for the same consumers meaning they can’t be left in the dust.

Some consumers still prefer to pay with cash while many others enjoy inserting or tapping their debit or credit cards.

Some savvy consumers opt to tap their smartphones with the likes of Apple Pay or Google Pay, while others still prefer scanning a QR code or using the fairly new interbank instant payment app PayShap.

Retailers need to cater for these ever-evolving tender types, including vouchers, mobile wallets and cryptocurrency.

Ever-increasing payment options, which brings increased attack surfaces, shines the spotlight on security. A security breach comes with an obvious financial risk, but there are also reputational, compliance and legal risks to consider.

Smaller companies often cannot take on the financial burden of having to invest in an array of different security and compliance obligations.

This opens them up to vulnerabilities which they simply cannot control. A partner, who brings enterprise experience and solutions to the mid-market segment, effectively levels the playing field because a one-stop solution that’s encrypted end to end enables smaller retailers to serve customers as effectively and safely as their tier one counterparts.

With a significant proportion of payments still being conducted by cards, the first thing retailers need to understand is that there are Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) requirements based on their footprint and volume.

Effective partners come in and initiate risk descoping exercises, which effectively removes or minimises risks by implementing solutions such as point-to-point encryption for cards.

Naturally, cash is still highly prevalent in South Africa, meaning that retailers need clearly defined systems and processes for how they manage cash.

Technology plays an important role here, where reconciliation software ensures that retailers have financial certainty and a single source of truth for all the tender types they accept, and not just card payments.

The card space is already highly regulated, but with increasing options for alternative payments, such as SnapScan, PayShap, and even Cryptocurrency, regulators will mandate security mechanisms and best practice.

Retailers should appreciate that these are new and different technologies, and as such they come with new and different challenges.

Cyber criminals evolve at breakneck speed, and in any organisation there are vulnerabilities in code that can be exploited.

It is non-negotiable to build robust in-house capability to stay ahead of trends or partner with specialists who can. For example, while not directly related to payments, South Africa is now one of the most targeted countries in the world for ransomware.

Yet, despite needing to address vulnerabilities across all attack surfaces, the biggest risk for any organisation is its people, followed by processes that fail.

Retailers should proactively invest heavily in staff training and education, as well as reactive security in the form of audits and controls, which – if effective – can help it identify problems quickly.

Retailers also need to stay on top of preventative controls and measures to prevent any unauthorised individuals accessing their systems.

It is too late if a breach is detected only after the nefarious actor has entered the environment.

An example of this would be workflows to terminate unauthorised access during onboarding and offboarding of staff.

Another effective security strategy, which is made easy with modern, best-of-beed in-person payment solutions, is segregating duties to ensure that one individual never has complete control over a process.

It is evident that every time someone taps their smartphone or enters a voucher code, there are a host of highly complex systems and processes that are triggered, including encryption, payment rails, switching, settlement and reconciliation, among more. Security needs to be woven into every step.

While this really has been the source of many sleepless nights for those in charge of IT and security at mid-market retailers, the evolution of technology means this no longer has to be the case.

As long as a smaller retailer sources a partner with a long, proven track record in the enterprise space that can bring the same level of tier one security and functionality to smaller businesses in simple one-stop solutions, it has all but future-proofed itself and can confidently punch above its weight.