Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Gift cards issued by retailers are heating up, according to the latest research from Mercator Advisory Group. Total loads grew 6% in 2016 to reach $133.9 billion, Mercator’s Ben Jackson tells Digital Transactions News. That performance follows a decline in loads the year before. The research, which covers closed-loop gift …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A landmark anti-steering case against American Express Co. is going to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorneys general from 11 states have asked the high court to review a decision handed down in September by a federal appeals court that upheld AmEx’s policy of banning merchants from

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews The U.S. transition to the EMV chip card standard has been a long and troubled road, but statistics released by the international standards body behind EMV indicate encouraging progress. As of the end of 2016, 52.2% of major-brand payment cards in the United States—some 675 million …

• Washlava, a startup focusing on self-service laundromats, release its mobile app that enables users to reserve an LG Giant commercial washing machine and pay for the use via the app after tapping the phone against the machine. • Vending-payments specialist USA Technologies Inc. said the amount of contactless payments for laundry …

Payments observers have expected Apple Inc. to add person-to-person payments to its Apple Pay mobile-payments service for almost as long as the mobile wallet has been available, and on Monday, the computing giant obliged. Without adding much detail, Apple announced that users of its iMessage feature will be able to …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The number of data breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center in 2017 hit 698 as of May 30, a 35.3% increase over the record pace of a year ago when the ITRC flagged 516 breaches in 2016’s first five months. The San Diego-based nonprofit monitors …

• EDGE Mobile Payments LLC, which offers a card-consolidation device, said it is offering users of the former Coin card a discount on the purchase of its EDGE Card. Fitbit Inc. purchased Coin in 2016, and the service was shuttered earlier this year. • PayPal Holdings Inc.’s dominance in e-commerce payments …

Finally, the rumors can stop. Sage Payment Solutions, the U.S. merchant-services arm of Sage Group plc, has been sold to GTCR LLC, a Chicago-based private-equity firm, for $260 million, GTCR announced Friday. Reports of a possible sale of the company, which counts approximately 100,000 merchants in its portfolio, originally surfaced …

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By Jim Daly and John Stewart The U.S. conversion to EMV is close to two years old now, and in its wake have come unquestioned benefits. But this cure for widespread counterfeit card fraud also has ushered in excruciating side effects. It’s easy to forget that the Europay-Mastercard-Visa chip card …

By Kevin Woodward A willingness to listen, knowledge of the industry and of the merchant, and preparation are key to skirting a merchant’s rebuff reflex. It’s a universal sales-agent experience. The rebuff, deflection, or outright rejection from a merchant who, in her mind, is yet again hearing a sales rep …

By Peter Lucas Visa and Mastercard are acting fast to dominate the rapidly developing tokenization business. Are juicy fees next? It’s been more than six months since Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. announced reciprocal access to one another’s tokenization engines. Pacts giving PayPal Holdings Inc. such access have emerged over …

By René Pelegero The Fed’s task force has made a lot of progress, and on some fronts the results look promising. So why does it seem like the creation story of Visa and Mastercard all over again? It has been a long time since the initial Faster Payments discussions in …

There are several reasons why you can’t rely on law and regulation, says Ed Adshead-Grant. Here’s where they fall short and what you should do about it. Initiatives like open banking and faster payments have ushered in a whole new era in the world of business-to-business payments. The industry is …

Tokenization is nothing new. Various companies have for years offered the service, which replaces the actual card credentials a thief needs to make illicit purchases—primary account number, card-verification value, expiration date—with a random string of characters for digital transactions. But what is new is that Visa and Mastercard have finally …

For former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Bob Carr, the next venture goes beyond simply making money. Carr led the $4.3 billion sale of his old company to Global Payments Inc. in April 2016. But rather than ride off into a comfortable retirement, Carr is back with his latest …

When you’ve got something hot like stolen credit card numbers, you have only a brief opportunity to cash in before they go cold. Manually sifting through hundreds, even thousands, of card accounts bought in bulk can take more time than criminals have, which is why they increasingly are relying on …

For the China-based Alipay payments service, pursuing niche merchant markets in North America no longer is good enough. “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” says Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America. Those partners so far include First Data Corp., which in May opened its huge U.S. …

The connection between computing capacity and payment practice is obvious to all. While passing coins hand-to-hand remains a ritual, the bulk of human transactions are carried out through electronic computing. Now, all the computers that we know—mainframes, minis, PCs, tablets, smart phones, and so on—are a special case of a …

What are the ingredients of payments modernization in the United States? I suggest there are three: 1. Faster Payments  The race to create a U.S. faster-payments system has begun. What’s not clear is what it will look like at the finish line. The variety of systems being either launched or …