Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Younger consumers are more likely to combine an in-store visit and online product research or purchases than their older counterparts. That’s one finding from the FutureBuystudy released Tuesday by GfK, a Germany-based research firm. The study, which examined U.S. consumer buying behavior, found that 46% of consumers between 18 and 26 …

Chatbot developer Kasisto Inc. has agreed to provide a so-called smartbot for Varo Money Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of a mobile-only banking app. Both the app and the bot are in beta testing and expected to launch early next year. The new bot, called Val, is based on conversational …

After an active 2015 in which such prominent payments-industry firms as processor First Data Corp. and merchant acquirer Square Inc. completed initial public offerings of stock, 2016 saw little IPO activity by payment firms. But 2017 could be a different story, according to an analyst. The most notable new U.S. …

• Payment provider CardConnect released a beta version of Bolt P2PE, its cloud-based API terminal service that enables software companies to integrate their applications with PCI-validated point-to-point encryption and EMV devices for card-present transactions. • Wizard World Inc., producer of such pop culture events as Comic Con, is working with Front Gate Tickets for …

The NFC Forum, the Wakefield, Mass.-based organization that supports near-field communication technology, on Monday announced updates to three technical specifications and introduced a “candidate” spec. NFC is the technology most often used, for example, to link mobile wallets with point-of-sale terminals. One update, to “NFC Controller Interface (NCI) Technical Specification Version 2.0,” …

An offshoot of artificial-intelligence research, chatbots emerged in 2016 as a popular technology for reaching and serving consumers for banking, payments, and shopping. Facebook’s Messenger app, which began supporting the bits of code this spring, was by September already crawling with 30,000 bots holding conversations with consumers to fulfill simple …

• Mobile in-store payments will total $91.7 billion by 2020, up from $18.7 billion this year, according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Browser-based and in-app mobile payments, however, will dwarf that number, reaching $318.8 billion, nearly doubling 2016’s $161.3 billion. • Movie-ticketing platform Atom Tickets will integrate JPMorgan Chase & …

Startups and established players alike have been working out payments applications for distributed-ledger technology for several years, and on Thursday one of those applications went commercial. San Francisco-based Wyre, founded in 2013, launched its cross-border payments service based on the blockchain. On the same day, Wyre also raised $5.8 million in a …

Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit has updated its Google Wallet to enable the person-to-person payments service to work on desktop computers and laptops using any browser. Google Wallet dates back to 2011 as a mobile-payments and P2P service, but in September 2015 Alphabet transferred the purchasing functionality to its Android Pay …

Consumers are making their shopping, and payments, preferences known this holiday season. They are spending 12% more on e-commerce purchases so far this shopping season than they did in 2015, reports comScore Inc. Consumers have made $49.3 billion in e-commerce purchases from Nov. 1 to Dec. 12 using a desktop computer at home …

• Yahoo! Inc. disclosed Wednesday a breach of more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013 that is separate from one involving 500 million accounts the Web giant announced in September. Yahoo said the new breach involved names, email addresses, birth dates, secure passwords, and security questions and answers, but did not …

Tougher security vetting by high-end luxury goods retailers has online fraudsters moving downscale to the still-profitable mid-price range, and crooks also are targeting refurbished consumer electronics, according to new findings from security technology firm Forter Inc. Forter, which has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel, this week released …

After PayPal Holdings Inc. in July signed a sweeping agreement with Visa Inc., and in September reached a similar deal with MasterCard Inc., giving PayPal access to the card networks’ token engines and thereby new access to the physical point of sale, observers wondered when the other shoe would drop. It dropped …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have been tokenizing their payment cards since 2014, but have not been able to access tokens for cards branded by the other network. That will change soon as the result of an agreement announced separately Thursday by Visa and MasterCard. Under the agreement, Visa will be able …

Bill payment continues to reign as the most-used payments feature of banks’ mobile apps, but mobile deposit and person-to-person payments are coming on strong, according to new findings from research firm Celent and FI Navigator Corp. The “Mobile Banking Quantified” study by Celent, a division of New York City-based of Oliver …

As gift cards continue to garner great consumer interest—they are the most sought-after gift this holiday season, says the National Retail Federation—two gift card providers announced moves to boost their respective market shares. In an exclusive deal, Atlanta-based InCommwill provide grocer cooperative Wakefern Food Corp. with a gift card and prepaid program. The …

Continuing the stepped-up growth rate it’s seen for nearly two years, the automated clearing house network’s transaction volume grew 5.7% in the third quarter, slightly better than the second quarter’s 5.6% growth. The third quarter was notable for marking the start of same-day ACH processing. The latest quarterly report from …

• Chip card standards body EMVCo reported that 42.4% of global general-purpose credit and debit card-present transactions from July 2015 to June 2016 involved an EMV chip card being read by an EMV-enabled point-of-sale terminal, up from 33% in the previous 12-month period. In the U.S., where the card networks’ POS EMV liability shifts took …

The merger of messaging apps and payments took another step forward Wednesday with the news that The Western Union Co. is allowing U.K. users of the popular Viber service to send money from within the app. The deal follows a similar arrangement the money-transfer kingpin made with Viber for U.S. …

Online commerce gets a lot of attention these days, but just how much of the retail economy in North America does it account for? The answer is 7%, according to a report released Tuesday by Boston-based researcher Aite Group. That’s accounting for all e-commerce sales as well as browser-based and …