Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The Federal Reserve may be shepherding a nationwide effort to bring real-time payments to the United States, but that doesn’t mean payments companies are marking time while that process unfolds. The latest development is Tuesday’s announcement that bank processor Fiserv Inc. will work with risk manager Early Warning Services LLC …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are shelling out ever more dollars to buy issuer loyalty and induce merchants to route transactions onto their networks. A Digital Transactions News analysis shows the two leading payment card networks are on track to spend approximately $6.75 billon on so-called rebates and incentives in …

Ending months of speculation, Visa Inc. on Monday announced it will buy its European counterpart, London-based Visa Europe Ltd., in a cash, stock, and earn-out deal valued at $23.4 billion. “We’re delighted to be reuniting the Visa family,” said Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf in discussing the acquisition …

Visa Inc. may be in the business of credit and debit cards, mobile wallets, tokenization, EMV chips and virtually anything involving electronic payments, but its latest financials tell the real story—it’s all about cash. On a day dominated by news of its pending $23 billion takeover of Visa Europe, Visa …

  If consumer adoption of mobile payments is going to break past its current low rate, purveyors of the services will have to find new ways of making m-payments faster and more convenient to use, and attractive for merchants to accept. That’s the assessment from Derek Francom, director of PayPal …

With two strokes of the pen, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC has addressed one glaring weakness in its mobile wallet. By announcing a deal this week with JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s brand-new Chase Pay mobile-payments service and two weeks ago with a little-known New York City-based app provider called BIM Networks …

  A recent Pennsylvania Department of Banking and Securities’ advisory about potentially requiring independent sales organizations and processors to obtain money-transmitter licenses could pose problems for the payments industry. “It’s the wrong execution of the right idea,” Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Electronic Transactions Association, …

Up to now, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo payments service has been strictly a mobile person-to-person product appealing largely to twenty-somethings, but within a year users will be able to pay with Venmo at PayPal merchants if the parent company’s plan works out as expected. PayPal disclosed Wednesday in its quarterly …

Samsung Pay, the mobile-payments service from Samsung Electronics Co. Inc., has added 14 Visa-MasterCard payment card issuers. In addition, Verizon Wireless, the holdout mobile carrier that was absent from Samsung Pay’s launch a month ago, is now supporting the service, a Samsung executive said Wednesday. “We’re expanding our ecosystems,” Thomas …

  A new mobile-payments service that includes loyalty and rewards has launched with the goal of providing retailers with a single source of mobile engagement with their consumers. Dubbed OmnyPay, the service is just one of the many announcements made this week at the annual Money 20/20 conference in Las …

With two key announcements this week, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC has brought the finish line much closer in its run to build a U.S. real-time payments system. While the New York City-based company has not set a date for completion, senior executives told Digital Transactions News Tuesday TCH …

  ClearXchange, a bank-owned person-to-person payments company that launched a real-time payments service in June, says its merger with Early Warning Services LLC will assuage concerns about security as more consumers and financial institutions use the service. Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Early Warning announced Monday it will buy San Francisco-based clearXchange for …

JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Monday unveiled its Chase Pay mobile wallet and said the product will begin rolling out in the middle of next year. Chase also said its new wallet will be accepted at merchants belonging to the Merchant Customer Exchange LLC, a retailer-controlled consortium that has been …

The latest forecast for mobile payments at the point of sale echoes what many other studies have said, which is that current volume is minuscule. But a convergence of forces, including mobile wallets coming preloaded with more and more smart phones and more point-of-sale terminals being able to accept new …

The controversial Dodd-Frank Act scored just 20% in an impromptu popularity poll Sunday afternoon, with its only support coming from someone in the federal government. The quick straw poll was hardly representative as the mere five respondents were panelists at a conference for payments executives, but the results do reflect …

Known for its iPad-based point-of-sale system, Revel Systems said Friday it is making a mobile-commerce app available that merchants can use with their own brands. The app—available now for iOS and Android devices—enables merchants to more easily allow consumers to access product information, check loyalty data, place orders, and pay …

Now that merchant acquirers, and, by extension, merchants, are liable for certain kinds of fraud losses if the merchants aren’t prepared for EMV chip cards, acquirers are starting to put in place EMV non-compliance fees to cover their new risk exposure. One of the first to move on this is …

VeriFone Systems Inc. on Thursday introduced a new point-of-sale terminal product line that embraces design cues from consumer electronics. With the new terminal line, VeriFone also introduced its first app store. Dubbed Engage, the series of six devices, which includes two countertop terminals, two PIN pads, and two portable devices, …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …

Top performing merchant acquirers make more than 103 basis points per transaction from merchants that process with them. That’s the finding from a survey of 37 independent sales organizations and acquirers conducted by Adil Consulting, an Omaha, Neb.-based payments-advisory firm. The median is 64 basis points. The top 20% of …