Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

• MoneyGram Inc. has entered into a confidentiality agreement with rival Euronet Worldwide Inc. to further consider Euronet’s unsolicited offer to acquire MoneyGram, which had previously entered into an agreement to be acquired by Ant Financial Services Group. • Merchant processor Total Merchant Services announced an expanded collection of application …

This article is the first installment of a three-part series this week on what the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payment Initiative means to the payment economy in the U.S., and how the payments ecosystem might get to “yes” on fixing what’s broken and deploying what’s possible. This part deals with the …

While independent sales organizations often say they want to compete on more than just price, pricing remains the main sales tool for many. But a growing number of ISOs and merchant acquirers are looking to add non-processing components to their product line-ups to attract and retain merchants. Several providers of …

Pundits have predicted the demise of the password for years, yet the simple user-name-and-password combination lives on, frustrating security pros and helping to fuel a spiraling epidemic of data breaches. The reason for the password’s longevity lies in its familiarity compared to newer, more effective authentication methods, says a report …

• Several veteran credit card executives, mostly from Bank of America and Capital One, have formed a new company to issue a credit card branded “Ollo.” Rob Habgood, formerly with both BofA and Capital One, is chief executive of the newly formed issuer, Fair Square Financial Holdings. Other executives with …

The subscription model is coming to payments for transit fares. Delerrok Inc., a transit fare-system provider, launched TouchPass this week, a fare-collection service that transit operators pay for via a subscription. TouchPass, a product of transit veterans Bob Hamilton, Gary Yamamura, and Susumu Kusakabe, who is a patent holder for …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews The future of checkout, the role of the big payments networks, and merchants’ card-acceptance costs preoccupied a panel of mobile-payments executives assembled Tuesday to assess the current state and near-term future of the still-developing payment technology. With respect to how in-store users should check out on …

• Wells Fargo & Co. will introduce cardless withdrawals to all 13,000 of its ATMs after testing the smart-phone-based service in various locales, a bank executive told Reuters. Wells reportedly is the first bank to roll out cardless ATM withdrawals across its entire ATM fleet. • ATM network operator Cardtronics plc …

The migration of payment card fraud to the Internet in the wake of EMV chip cards coming to the point of sale is not new, but new findings from a company that specializes in card-not-present risk control and chargeback reduction provide insights on the breadth of the problem and offer …

• Payments Canada, which owns and operates that nation’s payment clearing and settlement infrastructure, has hired consulting firm Accenture to advise it on a multiyear program called Modernization, which is aimed at creating a faster-payments regime. • Payments-solutions provider ACI Worldwide said its network of more than 130 payment-service providers serving more …

For a moment, I thought I was a thief. For a split second as I drove away from the ExxonMobil fuel pump, I thought I forgot to pay. In actuality, I had just used the ExxonMobil Speedpass+ app to make a contactless payment for fuel for the first time. ExxonMobil …

The name might evoke yawns, but the messaging standard known as ISO 20022 will be playing an increasingly important role in electronic payments in the future. The standard goes beyond bare-bones data related to a payment to facilitate the exchange of more information. The Federal Reserve Banks are encouraging more …

• Payments-automation specialist linked2pay has added a real-time merchant-onboarding capability to its Bank Centric Payments platform, allowing independent sales organizations and other resellers enrolled with a sponsor bank to register, underwrite, and board merchants for card processing electronically and immediately. • Mobile-commerce provider Sionic Mobile said it is integrating its ION Commerce …

Amazon.com Inc. announced an integration this week with an e-commerce platform called BigCommerce for its Amazon Pay service, but the company also clearly entertains big ambitions for the payment product it organized as a business in 2015. For now, Amazon Pay is on an upward trend. Some 33 million consumers, …

If it seems payments networks and processors are opening up to outside developers right and left these days, it may be because they are. “I don’t know when the tipping point was, but it feels like it was over the last 12 months,” says Ben Milne, chief executive of Des …

• Money transfer firm MoneyGram International Inc. said last week’s unsolicited $1 billion bid from Euronet Worldwide Inc., outdoing Ant Financial Services Group’s $880 million offer in January, meets the “company superior proposal” definition in the merger agreement with Ant. The determination means MoneyGram can further consider the Euronet offer. • Private-label and cobranded credit …

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has provided additional details about evaluating applications for its proposed limited-purpose national bank charter for financial-technology companies, but voices critical of the charter are growing louder. The OCC, a unit of the U.S. Treasury Department that regulates national banks, first proposed the …

As the sweeping plan to update the U.S. automated clearing house network and other parts of the country’s payments system—an initiative known as faster payments—draws nearer, the first hints of what it could mean for merchants are being discussed. The faster-payments project, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve, will …

• Merchant acquirer Elavon Inc. has appointed Jamie Walker chief executive officer. A 16-year veteran of U.S. Bancorp, which owns the processor, Walker was most recently chief administrative officer of the bank’s Payment Services division, and before that served as Elavon’s chief financial officer. • A blog post from data-security …

Rattle off a selection of payment trends—EMV, tokenization, fraud—and many e-retailers may be beset by apprehension. That’s especially true if the retailer looks to support emerging payment types, according to Matt Herren, director of payments analytics at Computer Services Inc., a Paducah, Ky.-based financial-technology provider. Herren, speaking at the Merchant …