U.S. EMV Shipments Spur Smart Card Growth and other Digital Transactions News briefs

• Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook reported at the company’s latest quarterly earnings call that the Apple Pay contactless mobile-payment service “is growing at a tremendous rate” and has more than five times the transaction volume it had a year ago, but he didn’t give numbers. The service, which is now available in China and Singapore, is adding 1 million users per week, Cook said. Some 2.5 million U.S. merchant locations now accept Apple Pay.

• The U.S. conversion to EMV chip cards is playing a major role in boosting overall worldwide shipments of smart cards, according to figures from the Smart Payments Association, a trade group. Worldwide shipments in 2015 totaled 2.06 billion, up 34% over 2014, while 570 million smart cards were shipped to the U.S. market last year, doubling the 2014 volume.

• Check-services specialist Digital Check Corp. promoted John Gainer to the new position of director of corporate strategy to help the company find new digital-payments and image-processing opportunities. Digital Check also promoted Jeff Hempker, formerly senior vice president for North America sales and marketing, to executive vice president to fill Gainer’s role.

• Processor Vantiv Inc. said its Merchant Services segment handled 4.85 billion transactions in the first quarter, up 10% year over year, and segment net revenues grew 17% to $341.2 million. Vantiv also promoted Stephanie Ferris to chief financial officer and added responsibility for product organization to chief operating officer Mark Heimbouch’s duties.

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) said first-quarter net revenue in its merchant-processing segment grew 9.3% year over year to $120.6 million; revenues in TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit grew 19.3% to $185 million.

• ATM and point-of-sale equipment and software provider NCR Corp. reported that hardware revenues declined 11% year over year in the first quarter, or 9% on a constant-currency basis, to $419 million, but software revenues increased 1%, or 3% on a constant-currency basis, to $482 million. Services revenues grew 4%, or 8% on a constant-currency basis, to $543 million.

• Prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. reported a net loss of $3.6 million in the first quarter versus a $4.7 million profit a year earlier, partly because of a $6 million revenue hit due to grocery stores putting stricter controls on open-loop prepaid card purchases through credit cards to avoid fraud as they implemented EMV chip card acceptance.