This week’s paytech news highlights leadership changes, mergers & acquisitions, and partnerships.
C-Suite Changes
- Fiserv Appoints Walter Pritchard as Head of Investor Relations: the leading global provider of payments and financial technology announced the appointment of Walter Pritchard as Senior Vice President, Head of Investor Relations, effective December 1, 2025. Pritchard brings more than 25 years of experience in investor relations, corporate strategy, finance and equity research. Most recently, he served as Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Development at Palo Alto Networks.
- Deutsche Bank Hires Vivienne Chia as Global Head of Private Bank Investment Solutions: to further enhance its global wealth and investment platform. Chia brings more than 25 years of industry expertise to the role. She previously served as global head of the Investment Solutions Group at Bank of Singapore and, before that, held multiple senior leadership positions at UBS.
Mergers & Acquisitions
- EQB Will Acquire PC® Financial Entities: EQB Inc. (EQB) and Loblaw Companies Limited announced on December 3, 2025, that they entered into a definitive agreement for EQB to acquire President’s Choice Bank, PC Financial Insurance Agency Inc., PC Financial Insurance Brokers Inc., and certain other affiliated entities of PC Bank (collectively, PC Financial) for approximately $800 million.
- Stripe Agrees to Buy U.S. Billing Platform, Metronome: US fintech giant Stripe has agreed to acquire Metronome, a billing start-up founded by former Dropbox engineering director Scott Woody in 2019. Metronome provides tools for managing billing, pricing, and revenue operations for businesses using cloud-based systems, with clients including OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, Confluent, and Nvidia.
Partnerships
- Visa Lists Intelligent Commerce Tools in AWS Marketplace: giving developers direct access to payment tools like authentication, tokenized payments, personalization, and intent capture.
Other Headlines
- Mastercard Black Friday report shows 4.1% increase in retail sales but cautions of the opportunity for fraud as 72% of consumers admit to shopping on unfamiliar websites.
- Shopify experiences outage on Cyber Monday but still hit record sales with a 27% increase from Black Friday-Cyber Monday from 2024.
- Usage of buy now, pay later drove $1.03 billion in online spend, a 4.2% year-over-year increase on Cyber Monday.
- Klarna launching new tap-to-pay feature in 14 European markets bringing consumers the ease of online shopping into the bricks and mortar stores.
- Black Friday in the UK saw Visa block 280% more suspected fraud attempts compared to last year; 140% more across the rest of Europe.
- Visa is collaborating to launch Vietnam’s first AI-powered pay-later card, looking to increase the low credit card penetration in the country.
- PayPal is launching buy now, pay later service in Canada, allowing customers to split purchases into installments for partnering merchants.
