Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The company behind the rapidly growing Alipay mobile-payment service is acquiring the second-largest U.S. based money-transfer company. China-based Ant Financial Services Group’s deal to buy Dallas-based MoneyGram International Inc. for $880 million in cash will likely close some time in the second half of the year , according to an …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) reported that it is talking with the Federal Trade Commission to settle the FTC’s November lawsuit accusing TSYS’s NetSpend prepaid card unit of deceptively marketing reloadable prepaid cards. TSYS took a $13 million charge in the fourth quarter in connection with the settlement talks. • Newtek …

The total number of Visa Inc. credit and debit cards bearing an EMV chip numbered 408.1 million at the end of December, Visa announced Thursday. That’s a 2.1% increase from the 399.9 million tally at the end of November. Of the total, 219.4 million are debit cards and 188.7 million …

The Federal Reserve’s Faster Payments Task Force is in the final stages of reviewing 19 proposals to speed up U.S. electronic payments, Fed executives tell Digital Transactions News. The faster-payments initiative is part of the Fed’s broader Payment System Improvement project that also addresses security and efficiency issues. The Fed …

PayPal Holdings Inc. finished its first full calendar year separated from eBay Inc. with a tone that suggests a bit of swagger. “It was a landmark year for PayPal,” chief executive Dan Schulman told stock analysts Thursday afternoon. “We introduced a host of innovations. We bring to our merchants an …

Total dollar volume on Discover Financial Services’ networks increased 2% in the fourth quarter to hit $80.2 billion versus $78.8 billion a year earlier, but results varied among the company’s payment operations. Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover reported Tuesday that the Discover credit card unit posted proprietary volume of $34 billion, up …

• A survey released by RestaurantOwner.com, a resource enterprise for independent restaurant owners, found that the average cost of a restaurant POS system is $13,344, compared with $18,000 in 2012. Only 10% of the 1,190 respondents said they use pay-at-the-table devices, and only 31% used EMV-compliant systems. • Restaurant Brands International, parent company …

The nation’s automated clearing house network handled more than 13 million same-day transactions worth almost $17 billion between Sept. 23 and the end of the year, according to statistics released Wednesday by NACHA, the rulemaking authority for the ACH. Wednesday’s release represents the second time NACHA has issued numbers for …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews NCR Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a redesigned app for its NCR Silver iPad-based point-of-sale system that eliminates 33 taps from the transaction process and skips the home page in favor of a fly-out menu.

Cachet Financial Solutions Inc., a small tech company best known for providing remote deposit capture services to banks and credit unions, is trying to raise nearly $14 million in new equity to shore up its finances while pivoting toward prepaid cards and facing a legal deadline to rebrand. In a …

• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

In the battle over online bill payments, biller sites have been beating bank and third-party sites handily, but now the battle has turned into a rout. Biller sites accounted for fully 73% of online bills paid by consumers last year, up from 62% in 2010, according to a report released …

Like other technology forecasters, Juniper Research in a new report predicts the Internet of Things is poised for explosive growth. But the IoT also represents “an unmanageable cybersecurity risk” unless its developers take preventative action, Juniper says. In its report, “Internet of Things for Security Providers: Opportunities, Strategies, & Market …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

Travel providers have new options for accommodating how consumers use their smart phones to pay for travel. Ticketing-software vendor Rambus Ecebs has introduced a set of products for mobile ticketing that rely on host card emulation to load smart cards into smart phones. Host card emulation enables download of payment credentials via …

Fourth-quarter profits and U.S. charge volume declined while marketing expenses increased for American Express Co. as the company continued to dig its way out of the hole left last year by the termination of its U.S. cobranding and acceptance pact with Costco Wholesale Corp. New York City-based AmEx reported Thursday …

• Payments provider Dwolla Inc. announced a $6.85 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Foundry Group. The funds will be used to expand sales and account-management operations at the company’s Des Moines, Iowa office. Dwolla also said it is moving its white-label products into a new collection of application …

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

The digital-payments revolution may finally be poised to relegate cash to the sidelines of finance. Worldwide, 471 billion so-called cashless transactions flowed through payments networks in 2015, a 52% increase since the end of 2011 and up 13% over 2014, according to numbers released this week by Retail Banking Research …

• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …