Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks.
• Newtek Business Services Corp., parent company of merchant processor Newtek Merchant Solutions, priced 2.25 million shares of common stock in a public offering at $15.25 per share to raise $34.3 million in gross proceeds.
• Independent sales organization Total Merchant Services Inc. announced the expansion of its free-terminal program to include the company’s entire family of products, including readers, point-of-sale terminals, and POS systems.
• The massive social network Facebook today started offering the option of hardware security keys, which fit into a computer’s USB port, as an additional authentication factor. The hardware device is recommended by the FIDO Alliance, a cross-industry technical group working on alternatives to online passwords.
• Bluefin Payment Systems released a white paper on the impact of PCI-validated point-to-point encryption technology.
• Atom Tickets, provider of a mobile-ticketing service for movie theaters, announced Bow Tie Cinemas will support the app.
• Information-security specialist Thales released its 2017 Thales Data Threat Report that found that 26% of respondents experienced a data breach in 2016.
• Research firm Technavio released a forecast on the global EMV POS terminal market that suggests a nearly 10% compounded annual growth rate through 2021.
