Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. stunned the payments industry late Monday with an announcement that its chief executive, Charles Scharf, has resigned, effective Dec. 1. Scharf will be replaced by Alfred F. Kelly, a 23-year veteran of American Express Co. and currently a Visa board member. Kelly, whose service …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While the payments business is caught up these days in working out strategies for mobile apps and social media, it turns out these aren’t the cutting-edge technologies they once were. Instead, fields like virtual reality, machine learning, and natural language are winning the spotlight. That’s according …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Its first full quarter of ownership of the big Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded credit card portfolio helped to boost Citigroup Inc.’s North American purchase volume by 57%, the giant New York City-based bank reported Friday.

• The rash of hotel breaches continues. Noble House Hotels & Resorts said it confirmed that a payment card system used at its Teton Mountain Lodge & Spa and Hotel Terra may have been breached between Sept. 5 and Sept. 6. The company said there are no indications the breach …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews With the deadline for EMV compliance for fuel resellers a year away, fuel-pump maker Wayne Fueling Systems LLC is readying its products for the transition from magnetic-stripe payment cards. Wayne says its NAMOS point-of-sale system is now available for EMV transactions on First Data Corp.’s network, and …

• Payments provider TransFirst, a unit of Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), and Raintree Systems, which provides specialized practice-management software, formed a partnership that sees TransFirst as the integrated payments provider in Raintree’s software. • Following its decision earlier this week to halt production, sale, and exchange of its troubled …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ripple effects from the Wendy’s Co. data breach continue to swirl around the Columbus, Ohio-based hamburger chain, some perhaps in unexpected ways. A Michigan credit union that last week began declining credit and debit card transactions by its members at all Wendy’s locations refuses to say …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Fuzse, a new payments company targeting merchants that want seamless payment flows, is embracing software developers and independent software vendors as a way to reach them. The Dallas-based company, founded by Lane Conner, a former executive at First American Payment Systems L.P., Century Payments, and most recently …

• Payment gateway Shift4 Corp., which claims to have introduced in 2005 the first payment-data tokenization solution, announced it has surpassed the 7-billion mark in tokenized transactions. • The NFC Forum announced it has made available a newly adopted and four candidate technical specifications for near-field communication. The adopted specification …

With an eye on having tangible proposals out by mid-2017, two Federal Reserve task forces are about to evaluate 19 plans to make electronic payments faster. Speed and security usually come to mind first when payments executives talk about improving the U.S. payment system, but other factors increasingly important to …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ever since the advent of mobile shopping, experts have cautioned that spending in the new channel would be hampered by small screens and clunky interfaces. Now, though, relatively new technology like natural-language interfaces and so-called bots may be coming to the rescue. A new study released …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Best known nationally for its powerful basketball teams, the University of Connecticut is about to make a name for itself in cybersecurity. UConn’s School of Engineering and retail credit provider Synchrony Financial on Tuesday announced that Synchrony is providing $2.2 million to fund a new

• To Go Stores, a Puerto Rico-based convenience-store chain, will use P97 Networks’ PetroZone mobile commerce and digital marketing platform to enable mobile payments at the pump and for in-store transactions, P97 Networks announced. • Mattress retailer Casper Sleep Inc. said it is now accepting Apple Pay for online purchases. …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Its many critics have labeled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as the regulatory agency run amok, but the CFPB declined to regulate virtual currencies in its newly released rule governing prepaid card accounts even though banks and consumer groups urged it to do so. The CFPB issued …

• Merchant processor Payroc LLC announced it has acquired payment gateway The iTransact Group. Terms were not disclosed. Besides the gateway, the deal brings 6,000 merchants with $1.3 billion in annual volume to Payroc, along with mobile point-of-sale technology and a payment-facilitator platform. • Payments provider Intrix Technology Inc. purchased the business …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Just a week into the fourth quarter, merchants and payments companies already are preparing for the busy holiday-shopping season. American Express Co. marks its seventh annual Small Business Saturday—Nov. 26—with the debut of the Shop Small Studio at ShopSmall.com. The service provides merchants with Web-site badges, flyers, …

• Office-supply giant Staples Inc. has begun accepting Apple Pay on its mobile Web site, m.staples.com. Staples early on began accepting Apple Inc.’s mobile wallet in its stores and on its app. Apple recently made the service available for browser-based payments using Safari. • More than half of consumers believe …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews For all the widespread anticipation of same-day settlement on the automated clearing house network, the first two weeks of faster processing has been a relatively quiet affair, bank executives and other experts tell Digital Transactions News. But that doesn’t mean a number of pressing questions aren’t …

Kohl’s Corp. joins the ranks of retailers with their own mobile-wallet services with the launch this week of Kohl’s Pay. Menomonee Falls, Wis.-based Kohl’s said the barcode mobile-payment service exclusively uses the private-label Kohl’s Charge card as the payment mechanism in more than 1,100 Kohl’s stores. To use Kohl’s Pay, …

By Peter Lucas@DTPaymentNews Payment processor Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) is rolling out Premium Payback, a rewards-redemption application that allows consumers to cash out rewards earned on credit and debit cards at the point of sale through participating merchants. FIS, which piloted Premium Payback at more than 7,000 BP …