Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Independent sales organizations, merchant acquirers, and payment facilitators catering to small-business owners who have e-commerce sites now can sell them a MasterCard Inc. service to help mitigate the risk associated with card-not-present transactions. MasterCard introduced Simplify Controls Monday, a service that includes an online dashboard and app that enables merchants …

With more and more consumers getting accustomed to shopping online and on mobile devices, merchants are losing more and more sales to checkout abandonment. “Conversion rates aren’t where we’d like to see them,” said Joe Walent, a senior analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, a payments consultancy. Walent, who spoke Tuesday …

• Wells Fargo & Co. announced its Wells Fargo Wallet will launch this summer and be incorporated into the banking giant’s mobile-banking app for Android devices, giving customers the ability to make contactless near-field communication payments directly from the app. The app, developed in-house, also will work at Wells Fargo …

Confronted with pokey EMV transactions, consumers and merchants in the United States may be eagerly looking for the contactless revolution to start. But in the United Kingdom, the wave-and-pay method is already picking up quite a head of steam. Consumers in the U.K. performed just over 1 billion contactless transactions …

Two long-time members of Green Dot Corp.’s board of directors who were up for re-election suddenly resigned Sunday, just ahead of the company’s contested annual shareholder meeting Monday that potentially could lead to the ouster of company founder and chief executive Steven W. Streit. The Pasadena, Calif.-based prepaid card provider …

Green Dot Corp. shareholders re-elected chairman and chief executive Steven W. Streit to the company’s board of directors Monday after a proxy fight, but they also elected two nominees from dissident shareholder Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, which has called for Streit’s ouster. Harvest Capital, which says that Streit is not …

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Pay mobile-payment service, announced in October, is on track for tests this summer with greater availability in the fourth quarter, according to Kim Fitzsimmons, head of global e-commerce and large omnichannel solutions at Chase Commerce Solutions. Fitzsimmons, who spoke Monday during a panel discussion at …

Once known exclusively for enabling PIN-based debit card transactions at ATMs and then at the point of sale, the electronic funds transfer networks are broadening their payment options for merchants as they compete with global networks Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. for debit transactions. For example, payment processor First Data …

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems introduced Heartland Insights, a data and analytics service for restaurants that relies on the company’s point-of-sale and e-commerce solutions. Heartland recently became part of rival processor Global Payments Inc. • Canadian payments provider Beanstream expanded its service to U.S. merchants and integrated partners with …

Holders of the Walmart MoneyCard issued by Green Dot Corp.’s bank subsidiary have resorted to social media in the past few days to complain of not being able to check account balances or use their cards to make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs. The extent of the glitch is …

Cardless ATM technology that enables consumers to make cash withdrawals is now available via Android Pay at select Bank of America Corp. locations, the banking giant announced Wednesday at Google’s annual IO conference. BofA says the service has initially been available at some ATMs in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., New York …

Venture funding for payments companies may have slowed dramatically in recent months, but that’s not the case across the board. Bitcoin and blockchain startups in particular uncorked a geyser of cash in the first quarter, with dollars invested totaling $173 million on 39 deals, according to data released this week …

• Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) said it is integrating a machine-learning engine from Featurespace that will allow the processor to generate real-time decisions on individual consumers. TSYS says the speedier fraud-control processing will help prepare its clients for the arrival of real-time payments. • Plastc Inc., which markets a …

Members of Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime membership service are enthusiastic users of the e-retail giant’s payments service, which it makes available to other merchants. In fact, some 50% of Amazon Pay’s users belong to Prime, according to Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gauthier, who spoke with Digital Transactions News Tuesday at …

Rewards and loyalty cards are now common in the U.S. payments landscape, but new research findings show just how popular such cards have become. A study by Phoenix Marketing International says 93% of all credit card spending is now done on rewards cards, up from 88% in 2013. A separate …

• Fitness-band vendor Fitbit Inc. has acquired the wearable-payments assets of Coin in a deal that closed May 12 and includes relevant personnel and intellectual property. Terms were not disclosed. Coin, which was part of a wearable-payments initiative announced earlier this year by MasterCard Inc., is best-known for a device that …

• Visa Inc. announced its Visa Checkout digital wallet now has more than 12 million consumer accounts and is offered by more than 675 financial institutions in 16 countries. “Hundreds of thousands” of merchants now use the platform, Visa said, making Checkout one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the …

More than 80% of the fare value collected by the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System at its ticket windows and on its buses comes in the form of cash, so next spring the transit agency will start offloading that cash onto local 7-Elevens and other stores. DART and PayNearMe Inc., …

The increasingly dramatic proxy fight at prepaid card issuer Green Dot Corp., a fight that could cost its founder, chairman, and chief executive Steven W. Streit his job if management loses, took an interesting turn Monday when Green Dot said it would appoint George Gresham, a director nominee from the …

• WePay Inc. introduced a service that allows business-services platforms to offer card readers under their own brand to merchants for mobile acceptance of mag-stripe and EMV chip cards. Standard processing rate is 2.75% plus 30 cents. The first platforms to take advantage of the service are FreshBooks and Infusionsoft. …