Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

While one cannot deny the rise of social commerce and its pertinence to the overarching e-commerce industry, studies have shown that social-commerce strategies do not lead to as many purchases as you may think.  For example, Twitter recently phased out a buy button because it wasn’t seeing results, and another …

The tug-of-war over Earthport PLC continues. Visa Inc. upped its offer for the British business-to-business payment processor in a bidding war that started after Mastercard Inc. topped Visa’s original price. Visa is now offering 37 pence per share, which values the company at £247 million ($320.4 million). Visa’s new offer …

Mastercard Inc. introduced a so-called sonic brand identity, including a melody that will play when users deploy Mastercard in physical, digital, or voice commerce. Wells Fargo & Co. said late Thursday that its ATMs were back in service after an outage affected the bank’s ATMs, online and mobile banking services, …

Twenty-two days of talking to clients haven’t dampened Fiserv Inc.’s conviction that offering to buy First Data Corp. is the right move. In fact, if anything these conversations seem to have buoyed top executives’ confidence in the proposed $22 billion all-stock acquisition of the big processor. “We’ve spent a substantial …

Shares of USA Technologies Inc. lost half their value Thursday morning on news that the vending-machine payments provider’s auditor had resigned and that some of the company’s previous financial statements are unreliable. In a Feb. 1 letter to the audit committee of USAT’s board of directors, Chicago-based auditor RSM US …

Segpay Corp. debuted its Merchant Services Group, which is tasked with direct merchant-account placement, gateway, and other services for e-commerce merchants. Segpay has operated as a payment facilitator since 2005. A subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee will have a hearing at 2 p.m. Est. Feb. …

As if retailers and merchants didn’t have anything else to worry about, a malware threat called IcedID wants to set itself off as a special type, says a researcher at IBM Corp. In a blog post released Wednesday, the researcher says the criminal gangs using IcedID—disovered and named by IBM …

Merchant-processing revenues from North America grew 7% year-over-year in 2018’s fourth quarter to $1.1 billion on a comparable accounting basis, First Data Corp. reported Wednesday. First Data, which has an agreement to be acquired by processor Fiserv Inc. in a $22 billion all-stock deal, reported total quarterly revenues of $1.42 …

With the proposed merger of processing giants First Data Corp. and Fiserv Inc. looming over the payments landscape, players that both work and compete with the two companies are in a potentially ticklish position. But the chief executive of one such company made it clear Wednesday morning that First Data …

Mastercard Inc. named Paul Stoddart, who had been CEO of Vocalink after Mastercard acquired the U.K.-based real-time payments firm in 2017, as president, New Payment Platforms, effective March 1. Stoddart will oversee development of Mastercard’s real-time capabilities beyond traditional card-based services, including Vocalink, the Homesend joint venture, and Mastercard Send. …

PayPal Holdings Inc. says it has lent $50 billion to American consumers since it bought the BillMeLater lending service 11 years ago. The company also advanced its efforts to generate revenues from its Venmo peer-to-peer payment service by making subscription payments to the Tidal music-streaming service available through Venmo. Now …

The concept of push payments is finding favor among payments providers as two companies separately announce new disbursement services. Atlanta-based Repay said its Instant Funding service enables organizations to send funds directly to eligible Visa Inc. debit and prepaid cards via Visa Direct, the network’s real-time debit service. Repay’s lending clients, …

Point-of-sale technology provider Revel Systems released two new product lines, Revel Enterprise, for multilocation businesses, and Revel Essentials, aimed at restaurants and businesses with 20 or fewer locations. Shift4 Payments renamed its payment-management platform Lighthouse Transaction Manager. Formerly Dollars on the Net, the service enables merchants to access transaction reporting, …

When the technology emerged, mobile ordering was thought to be a natural for the restaurant industry, and now there’s some research showing just how popular these apps have become. It turns out that, from 2013 through 2017, digital orders at restaurants grew at an average annual rate of 23%, and …

USA Technologies Inc. agreed to provide its ePort Connect contactless-payments technology for air-vending machines deployed by CSC ServiceWorks Inc., a supplier of commercial washers and dryers, with 1.4 million laundry machines in service. Upserv, a payments provider specializing in hospitality, adopted the TM-m30 receipt printer and TM-U220 kitchen printer from …

New Jersey legislators last week passed a bill with overwhelming support to prevent businesses from banning consumers from using cash for purchases. The bill, which now goes to Gov. Phil Murphy for his signature, would make New Jersey only the second state to protect cash-using customers in stores. The proposed …

Fiserv Inc. and First Data Corp. argue their proposed $22 billion combination will usher in a processing behemoth that should create substantial operating efficiencies and economies of scale. And so far, investors are buying that story. Shares of both companies are up by double-digit percentages since the Jan. 16 announcement …

Growth on the automated clearing house network continued apace in 2018’s fourth quarter, boosted by same-day transactions, person-to-person payments, and online commerce. The massive network linking nearly all of the nation’s financial institutions tallied 5.97 billion transactions, up 8.7% from 5.49 billion a year earlier. It was the network’s fastest …

Elavon, the Atlanta-based merchant-acquiring subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp, says it plans to hire approximately 500 employees globally over the next three years. Elavon currently employs more than 730 people in Atlanta and more than 4,500 worldwide. BlockChyp Inc., a payment software and gateway provider, said it completed Level 3 certification …

So far, Visa Inc. has dominated the headlines regarding the U.S. conversion to contactless payment cards. Mastercard Inc., however, will soon be getting into the act. “In the U.S., contactless momentum continues to grow on both issuing and acceptance sides,” Mastercard president and chief executive Ajay Banga said Thursday. “We …