Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Friday’s disclosure from hotel giant Marriott International Inc. that hackers compromised information on up to 500 million guests held in its Starwood reservation system raises the question of whether fraudsters will be able to use an unknown quantity of encrypted payment card numbers because they also might have stolen the …

Independent sales organization Gearfire Payments announced new plans to focus on reducing payment costs for the shooting-sports industry. Atom Tickets, a mobile-ticketing service for the movie industry, said it integrated SMG Access, a loyalty program from Studio Movie Grill, an operator of movie theaters featuring in-theater dining. Target Corp. may …

Amazon.com Inc.’s strategy to push its Amazon Pay wallet into physical stores could depend crucially on its ability to cut payment-processing costs and generate marketing advantages for merchants, including Groupon-like incentives, experts tell Digital Transactions News. The new strategy has been in the works at least since 2017 but reached …

Online and mobile payments get all the press, but plenty of card-not-present payments still originate from telephone orders. The security threats from such orders are changing, which prompted the PCI Security Standards Council to issue an update Wednesday to guidance it first produced seven years ago for protecting phone-based payments. …

Waiting for a server to bring a paper bill to a table so the payment can be made might not happen at some restaurants if tests by Glance Technologies of its Real-Time Bill feature prove successful. Announced Wednesday, the feature, which is in testing at undisclosed merchants, enables users to …

A consumer bill-pay survey revealed that 46% of consumers routinely pay after the due date or never pay at all. Of these, 72% are “very” or “extremely likely” to pay on time if they could pay with a credit or debit card, while 69% would pay on time if they …

Counterfeit fraud losses continue to decline, according to Visa Inc.’s latest report about the U.S. conversion to the EMV chip card standard. But Visa’s EMV dollar volume was lower in September than in June, and the number of merchants that accept chip cards remained unchanged at 3.1 million. Visa says …

Add e-commerce platform Shopify Inc. to the roster of entities that experienced record sales during the recent holiday-shopping weekend, reporting $1.5 billion in volume from Friday through Monday. Two-thirds of that came from mobile transactions. Mobile commerce took the top spot on Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, according to …

First Data Corp. released its Holiday Insights dashboard, which shows real-time U.S. holiday spending trends, such as total spend percentage increase, today’s most active categories with average ticket and total transactions, and regional payment volume. To date, it indicates retail spending from Thanksgiving through Black Friday increased 6.4% year-over-year. Cardfree Inc., …

The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority announced Monday that its initial investigation has found that PayPal Holdings Inc.’s September acquisition of Swedish processor iZettle AB could reduce competition or raise prices in the payments market. But whether the antitrust regulator will unwind the deal is far from certain. “While …

More consumers took to their smart phones this past Friday, known as Black Friday, at the expense of shopping online with a desktop computer, finds Akamai Technologies, a Web-services company. Consumers using mobile devices accounted for 57.6% of online shopping on Nov. 23, compared with 35.9% for those using desktop …

Bitcoin’s return to volatility in recent days isn’t the only issue the digital currency confronts as it seeks to establish a toehold in the world of payments. As it turns out, its use in actual payment transactions is shrinking fast, according to numbers compiled by Chainalysis Inc., a New York …

Mobile remote deposit capture software provider Mitek Systems Inc. reported that chief financial officer Jeffrey C. Davison, who in August said he would resign effective Nov. 30, has changed his mind and won’t quit. Mitek’s board of directors accepted the rescission. Long-time chief executive Jim DeBello recently left and has …

  Most merchants are in business because of their passion about a product or service, and because they are interested in making money. To succeed, business owners must be prepared for the many obstacles they can face. When it comes to electronic payment acceptance, security is one of the challenges …

After slipping the previous two years, spending at independent shops and restaurants jumped 38% to an estimated $17.8 billion on Small Business Saturday, American Express Co. and the National Federation of Independent Business trade group reported Monday. AmEx founded the Saturday-after-Thanksgiving promotion in 2010 to highlight locally owned businesses in …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …

Worldpay Inc. and Paysafe Group announced a partnership to establish a payments platform for the U.S. online-gaming and sports-betting sector. The U.S. Secret Service lit up Operation Deep Impact last week in a nationwide initiative to find and remove credit and debit card skimming devices on fuel pumps. Following a …

Chevron and Texaco fuel retailers have another option when considering EMV upgrades at the pump with the debut of a Gilbarco Veeder-Root program. Launched this week, the program enables these convenience-store operators to trade in their current non-EMV-compliant equipment from their pumps for the Passport POS service from Greensboro, N.C.-based …

Payments experts may think mobile technology is crucial for banks and other financial-service providers, but it turns out a significant chunk of financial institutions don’t agree. Fourteen percent of respondents in a survey this summer of banks and credit unions said they not only don’t offer mobile payments and other …

Processor Pineapple Payments said it is offering merchant services on the platform of OnPay Solutions, a provider of accounts-payable and accounts-receivable automation services for businesses. First Data Corp. launched its Clover Mini and Clover Flex smart point-of-sale terminals in Argentina. Elo, a bank-owned payment network in Brazil, agreed to work with …