Mastercard and Visa seek to get the most out of the digital-payments boom

THE GREATEST accolade a payment system can aspire to is to be forgotten about. “People don’t want to make payments,” says Diana Layfield, an executive on Google’s payments team. “They want to do what a payment facilitates.” The industry’s biggest battles therefore often happen in the shadows. The latest struggle, which sees card networks, tech firms and governments vie to control the virtual pipes along which digital money flows, is no exception. Recent manoeuvres by governments, card networks and even SWIFT, the main interbank messaging service for cross-border payments, show how the battle lines are shifting.