- Joe Kaplan, the chief executive of merchant processor Paya and former president of the Electronic Transactions Association’s board of directors, died unexpectedly last week, the ETA announced. Kaplan was the former CEO of Total Merchant Services and founded Innovative Merchant Solutions, which he sold to Intuit Inc. in 2003 and continued running until he moved to TMS in 2012. Last October he became CEO of Sage Payment Solutions, which was rebranded as Paya in January.
- Contactless payments worldwide will pass $1 trillion this year, according to a Juniper Research forecast, a year earlier than the research firm had expected. That total will then double by 2020 and will represent 15% of all point-of-sale volume, the firm says. The forecast takes into account both card-based and mobile-wallet volume.
- Financial-services technology firm Fiserv Inc. has teamed with cybersecurity provider BlueVoyant to offer a managed-security platform for financial institutions that includes such capabilities as threat detection, response and remediation, regulatory compliance, and reporting.
- Online transaction processor Allied Wallet announced it will explore an initial public offering in the first quarter of 2019.
- Rambus Inc. said ScotRail, Scotland’s national rail operator, has launched its mobile-ticketing service, which allows passengers to tap through gates with electronic tickets downloaded to their smart phones.
- A study by risk-scoring specialist FICO showed payment card fraud losses in the United Kingdom fell 8% in 2017, the first reduction in card fraud there since 2011. The decline came on strength in battling card-not-present fraud, FICO said.
- IBM said it is working with CLS, a foreign-exchange services and settlement provider, on a platform project called LedgerConnect that uses distributed-ledger technology. The companies envision banks and other financial firms using the platform for know-your-customer processes, sanctions screening, collateral management, derivatives post-trade processing and reconciliation, and market data.
- Zebit Inc., which offers an e-commerce platform that lets consumers pay for purchases over time, has hired Pini Ben-Or as chief of risk and analytics. Ben-Or, who has more than 25 years of experience in credit-risk management, most recently led analytics at Actimize, a provider of risk and compliance software.
- Peter Tapling, until recently chief revenue officer for Early Warning Services LLC, has joined blockchain-based financial-services provider Spring Labs as chief commercial officer and head of industry relations. Tapling left Early Warning, which operates the Zelle peer-to-peer payments network, in December, according to his LinkedIn profile.
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