• The total value of contactless transactions worldwide will reach nearly $500 billion next year, up fully 56% from an estimated $321 billion in 2016, according to Juniper Research.
• Samsung Electronics America Inc. said more than 500,000 replacement Galaxy Note7 phablets have arrived in the U.S. and will be available for exchange Wednesday. Samsung is exchanging the new smart phones after news reports that a flawed battery cell caused some devices to ignite while recharging. Samsung offers its Samsung Pay mobile wallet on the Note7 and eight other smart-phone models.
• The U.S. Secret Service warned banks and retail ATM owners about a new fraud technique called “periscope skimming” in which fraudsters place a battery-powered probe through the top of the ATM and which connects directly to the machine’s circuit board to steal card data, KrebsOnSecurity reported.
• Independent sales organization CardConnect Corp. announced a new release of its CardPointe platform that offers mobile, online, and integrated payment acceptance.
• Payments-technology platform provider linked2pay introduced automated merchant approval for automated clearing house and remote deposit capture transactions.
• Risk-control technology provider iovation Inc. introduced iovationScore, a machine-learning fraud-detection product that uses analytics trained from more than 23 billion transactions.
• The Electronic Transactions Association on Wednesday is hosting a Payments Fly-In on Capitol Hill, enabling more than 50 payments and technology executives to meet with members of Congress and federal regulators. The ETA on Thursday will also host a policy forum.
Shoptalk Commerce, organizer of the Shoptalk e-commerce conference in the U.S., announced a European version set for October 2017 in Copenhagen.