Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Observers of mobile wallets have focused attention on user counts as a sign of adoption, but that leaves open the question of how many of these consumers are turning into habitual users. As it turns out, mobile-payments apps have a much harder time retaining users than do banking apps, according …

Chargebacks911, a dispute-mitigation and risk-management provider, said Santa Barbara, Calif., has the highest rate of fraudulent credit card chargebacks at 6.79%, followed by Paradise Valley, Ariz., 6.73%, and La Mirada, Calif., 6.68%. Other top 10 cites are listed in the company’s chargeback study, the second since 2014.Mobile-shopping and -payments app …

Venture capital continues to flow to payments companies, which ranked among the top recipients of financial-technology sector funding in the third quarter, according to a new report. And credit-union services organization PSCU announced it will invest $100 million in its payments platform over the next three years. Sweden-based Klarna, a …

HSBC Bank USA N.A. has made a real-time payments service, via The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, available to its commercial and institutional clients. HSBC said these clients have been able to receive real-time payments since July and now can send them. HSBC expects to roll out the service to its consumer …

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018. More than one year later, most financial organizations—including banks, payment and trading services, and global exchanges, as well as the companies that rely on them—are struggling to maintain GDPR compliance.  While prohibitive costs and the derailment of other, …

Confirming rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into issues involving debit card transaction routing, Visa Inc. late last week reported the Federal Trade Commission has asked it to voluntarily provide information about its routing practices. In a brief notice in its fiscal 2019 report to the Securities and …

U.S. payments companies looking to acquire properties in key markets like e-commerce and merchant acquiring have found a willing seller in Sage Group PLC. Early Monday, the company announced it agreed to sell its payments gateway, Sage Pay Europe Ltd., to Atlanta-based Elavon for $300 million. The deal will bring …

Checkers Drive-in Restaurants Inc., which in May said malware had affected certain of its Checkers and Rally’s locations, said it is aware the malware had affected one more Checkers and Rally’s location and also that the malware had been re-installed at “several” locations the company had previously identified as affected. The company …

In its first full quarter as a public company, Repay Holdings Corp. said its card-payment volume of $2.6 billion was a 40% increase over the 2018 third quarter. Payments providers Usio Inc. and Net Element Inc. also reported their earnings results. Atlanta-based Repay, which acquired APS Payments and TriSource Solutions …

Ever since Apple Pay debuted in 2014, Apple Inc. has kept the near-field communication chip in its devices off-limits to payment apps from other companies. But now legislation has appeared in Germany that may force the computing giant to grant access to that all-important chip, which allows Apple phones and …

U.S. Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.) planned this week to introduce bills that would bar tech firms from developing their own cryptocurrencies and make it more difficult for non-financial firms to obtain charters for industrial-loan corporations, a form of a bank, according to Politico. Garcia’s office did not immediately respond to a request …

Merchant processor Priority Technology Holdings Inc. posted an 11% increase in payment volume in the third quarter despite the wind-down of its once-sizable processing business for online subscription billers. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Priority said it processed $10.8 billion in merchant bank card volume versus $9.71 billion in 2018’s third quarter, on …

Now that Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, …

The Federal Trade Commission has started a preliminary inquiry into whether Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., and large debit card issuers are blocking merchants from routing transactions over PIN-debit networks, the Bloomberg Law news service reported, citing anonymous sources. FTC investigators reportedly have contacted merchants and their trade groups, Bloomberg Law said. Spokespersons for …

Compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard remains an elusive goal for many merchants and other organizations that handle general-purpose payment card data. In fact, compliance fell in 2018 for the second year in a row, according to Verizon Communications Inc. Verizon’s newly released Payment Security Report says only …

With Facebook Inc.’s launch Tuesday of Facebook Pay, the social-media giant may feel somewhat assured that many of its 1.6 billion daily users will at least try the new wallet when making purchases in one of the company’s social networks. But that does not mean the rest of the payments …

Boost Payment Solutions Inc., an acquirer for commercial card transactions, said it is collaborating with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to process payments and automate delivery for Chase’s Single Use Card Accounts and other commercial cards.Cardlytics Inc., which derives marketing intelligence from purchase data, reported a 116% year-over-year increase in monthly …

As peer-to-peer payments services like Cash App, Venmo, and Zelle grow in popularity in the United States, some observers fret that underserved populations are being left behind. PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Xoom money-transfer service said Tuesday it’s attacking that issue in a collaboration with Walmart Inc. and Euronet Worldwide Inc.’s Ria remittance …

A retail trade association as well as Target Corp. have endorsed the Federal Reserve’s planned FedNow real-time gross settlement service. In a letter posted last week on the official FedNow comment site, the Washington, D.C.-based Retail Industry Leaders Association said “over the past decades RILA has seen competition and innovation …

Unattended-payments specialist USA Technologies Inc. held its first quarterly earnings call in more than a year following the resolution of accounting issues. In it, USAT reported first quarter fiscal 2020 revenue of $42.1 million, a 25.7% increase from $33.5 million a year ago. Its net loss for the quarter was $12.8 million, …