Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Consumer-payments services are starting to garner attention among businesses, with 76% of banks having corporate customers asking for automated business-to-consumer payment services. That’s the word from Bottomline Technologies Inc. in its 2019 B2B Payments and Working Capital Management Strategies Survey, released this week. The survey of more than 300 financial …

Conventional wisdom in the payments business has been that the advent and spread of contactless cards would pave the way for wider use of mobile payments. But research released this week indicates that may not be the case. Indeed, far from serving as the training wheels for mobile payments, new …

Boomtown Inc., which provides merchant-support services, raised $12 million in funding led by Telstra Ventures with others participating. The Series B funding will go toward building its Relay Software-as-a-Service platform and additional growth. Boomtown also announced that Robert H.B. Baldwin Jr., a member of the Global Payments Inc. board of …

Payments firms continue to strengthen their offerings in the dining sector as evidenced by Wednesday’s announcements from American Express Co., which said it had acquired reservation platform provider Resy Network Inc., and Shift4 Payments, which is launching a pay-at-table system called SkyTab and providing it to new merchants at no …

Processor Adyen N.V. said ride-share service Uber will use Adyen’s 3-D Secure service online and in-app. 3-D Secure is an online authentication standard that, now in its second iteration, uses multiple bits of data to verify elements of a transaction. Unlike the first version, 3-D Secure 2 aims to be …

Automatic Labs Inc., a unit of SiriusXM, announced its Connected Car Assistant is available at major retailers nationwide for $99.99. The product, which consists of an app and an adapter, allows drivers to pay road tolls, among other connected-car functions. Revel Systems Inc. completed the installation of its cloud-based iPad …

Of all e-commerce markets, grocery has long lagged behind in consumer adoption. But now there are signs that may be changing fast. In the year since early 2018, the proportion of U.S. consumers who had bought groceries online in the prior 12 months jumped from 23.1% to 36.8%, according to …

Parking is usually a sedate activity, unless you’re competing with another driver for a rare open spot on a busy downtown street or that space closest to the grocery store’s entryway. But parking as a new market for electronic payments is a different story, with intense activity by everyone from …

POSaBIT, a point-of-sale services provider for cannabis retailers, said an analysis of “hundreds of thousands” of transactions at more than 120 California, Washington, and Colorado stores found that consumers belonging to a cannabis retailer’s loyalty rewards program had a 28% higher average ticket value and visited the store more frequently …

Transaction and dollar volume for Priority Technology Holdings Inc. managed to grow in the first quarter despite the downsizing of the merchant processor’s formerly large online subscription-billing business. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Priority reported Monday that merchant bank card processing volume rose 8.8% to $9.9 billion versus $9.1 billion in 2018’s first …

A system that allows drivers to pay for gasoline at the pump using their E-ZPass toll tag took a step forward Monday with an announcement that P97 Networks Inc., a provider of in-vehicle payments services, will resell the PayByCar service from Verdeva Inc. Houston-based P97 says it has certified PayByCar …

SurchX, a surcharging specialist, launched SurchX for e-commerce platform Magento. SurchX automatically calculates surcharges and fee structures based on card type and jurisdiction. The fee can be passed on for the consumer to pay. Payments provider ACI Worldwide said its real-time payments technology is supporting BMO Financial Group’s efforts to …

Boosted in part by growing card-issuer demand for chip cards that support both contact and contactless payments, card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. on Thursday reported a 32% first-quarter increase in sales of U.S. credit and debit cards. Littleton, Colo.-based CPI didn’t specify how much dual-interface cards, which can handle …

A report that Bank of America Corp. might not renew its joint merchant-acquiring venture with leading payment processor First Data Corp. left observers wondering Thursday what the break-up of one of the payments industry’s biggest players would mean for the companies involved, and the wider industry. The joint venture, Bank …

Cardlytics Inc., a company that uses purchase data to help financial institutions manage their rewards programs with retail partners, reported its count of monthly active users reached 108.5 million in the first quarter, up 85% over the first quarter of 2018, as users from new clients JPMorgan Chase & Co. …

Green Dot Corp. saw its shares plummet Thursday morning after its chief executive late Wednesday surprised stock analysts with a plan to invest $60 million later this year in initiatives aimed at expanding the company’s reach into new markets for banking services. At mid-morning, the Pasadena, Calif.-based payments company was …

In an effort to boost its electronic bill-payment offerings, payments-technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. on Thursday announced its second recent acquisition from The Western Union Co., this one of mobile bill-presentment provider Walletron Inc. Today’s announcement came at the same time Naples, Fla.-based ACI said it will complete its previously …

Bank of America Corp. is considering not renewing its merchant-acquiring joint venture with First Data Corp., known as Bank of America Merchant Services, when the contract ends in June 2020, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources. BAMS is the nation’s third-largest acquirer, having processed $840 billion in payment …

Integration of JetPay, the processor NCR Corp. bought for $184 million in 2018, into NCR’s point-of-sale systems will be more broadly available in the second half of 2019, NCR said Tuesday. NCR intended to marry JetPay with its POS systems, including NCR Silver and Aloha, in an effort to offer …

An automated clearing house network rule tightening security around Internet purchases, one of the ACH’s fastest-growing transaction categories, is set to take effect Jan. 1. The rule change, technically an amendment, affects so-called WEB debits, which cover a wide variety of ACH-funded Internet payments. It will require merchants as ACH …