Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While many observers have lamented the apparently slow growth in consumers’ adoption of mobile payments, that doesn’t mean more consumers aren’t using mobile devices each year to buy things. It also doesn’t mean users aren’t getting more comfortable buying bigger-ticket items via mobile channels. Surveys by …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews U.S. consumers are becoming more aware of mobile payments, which could potentially increase use of the burgeoning digital-payment method. Indeed 56% of them are “extremely aware” of the technology, finds the 2016 North America Consumer Digital Payments Survey from Accenture. In 2015, the figure was 52%. Only …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The loss of its cobranded card and exclusive credit card acceptance relationship with Costco Wholesale Corp. hit American Express Co. hard in the third quarter, but AmEx’s chief financial officer on Wednesday said brighter days lie ahead as the company builds new business. The quarter ended Sept. …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Charles Scharf accomplished a lot in less than four years as Visa Inc.’s chief executive—he oversaw Visa’s acquisition of Visa Europe, a groundbreaking peace accord with PayPal Holdings Inc., and a cobranding and acceptance deal with Costco Wholesale Corp., among other things—but one of his unfinished tasks …

• Mobile e-commerce grew 60% last year to reach $120 billion, with 70% of that total coming through browsers (50%) and apps (20%) accessed via smart phones, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. • Routine usage of mobile devices to make payments remains flat with last …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While many experts have cited anecdotal evidence that more consumers would adopt and use mobile wallets if they could earn, manage, and redeem

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews With American Express Co. set to report its third-quarter financials Wednesday, the payments industry and Wall Street will be watching for signs from the beleaguered travel-and-entertainment giant about how it will recover from the loss of its cobranded card and acceptance relationship with Costco Wholesale Corp. AmEx …

• Bank of America Corp. said its debit card purchase volumes totaled $71 billion in the third quarter, up 2.5% from $69.3 billion a year earlier. U.S. credit card purchase volume increased 2% to $57.6 billion. BofA said it now has 21.3 million mobile-banking users, a 15.8% increase from 18.4 …

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