Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Already found liable for its role in a telemarketing scheme that defrauded consumers, Universal Processing Services of Wisconsin LLC, doing business as Newtek Merchant Solutions, now will have to pay its share of a $1.7 million fine, a U.S. District Court judge ruled last week. The Federal Trade Commission in …

Google Inc. is betting its latest mobile payments incarnation—Android Pay—will work better than Google Wallet did. Announced Thursday at Google I/O, its developer conference, Android Pay is poised to compete directly against Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, PayPal Inc., and the upcoming Samsung Pay for a piece of the burgeoning mobile-payments …

Discover Financial Services disclosed Thursday that it will enhance its company-wide anti-money laundering procedures under an agreement it signed with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The agreement does not call for fines. The pact follows by 11 months a consent order that Discover’s Delaware-based bank subsidiary, Discover Bank, struck …

Migrating point-of-sale systems to the EMV chip card standard is as much a herculean task as swapping out countertop POS terminals. Now processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) and POS-terminal maker Pax Technology Inc. say they have a product that can make the task easier for POS systems. The product, …

By John Stewart Few tactics lend instant credibility like adding heavy-hitter names to a company’s board. On Wednesday, the 5-year-old Bitcoin digital currency, and at least one startup offering Bitcoin wallets, gained a few notches on the credibility index when Xapo GmbH said Dee Hock, John Reed, and Lawrence Summers …

The use of smart phones and tablet computers to photograph and deposit checks through online-banking apps surpassed scanner-based remote deposit capture several years ago, but 2014 was a record breaker, according to new findings from research firm Celent, a unit of the Oliver Wyman Group. Some 2,100 banks and credit …

The U.S. Postal Service could generate as much as $1.1 billion in additional annual revenue after five years if it expanded its existing payment services. That’s according to a report from the USPS Office of Inspector General. But a hotly competitive market could dampen those prospects, experts say. Struggling with …

Carrying out business as usual is becoming harder to do as the payments business tries to adapt to new technologies. Asked at a recent San Francisco conference about what are the most disruptive trends in payments, 40% of industry professionals and alternative-finance executives polled cited the proliferation of mobile-wallet use …

In a time when consumers are using multiple ways—smart phones, tablets, stores, and Web sites—to shop, they are also using new ways to pay. Now, some are choosing to shop using Bitcoin, the best-known virtual currency. Some merchants, like Reeds Jewelers, accept Bitcoin primarily because customers want to use the …

A proposed $19 million settlement forged by MasterCard Inc. and retailer Target Corp. to compensate MasterCard issuers for fraud and other expenses they incurred after Target’s 2013 data breach failed to win approval from issuers representing 90% of eligible accounts that the so-called alternative-recovery plan needed by a May 20 …

Merchants, whether they sell online or in stores, consistently have one bugaboo about their payment-processing service: They want it to be cheaper. Online retailers, in particular, which pay higher card-not-present interchange rates, can use some simple practices to make a dent in these costs, as outlined this week in a …

Payments executives today are trying to assess the legacy of Benjamin Lawsky, New York State’s controversial top financial regulator who proposed the first regulations on virtual currencies. Lawsky, who became superintendent of the state’s Department of Financial Services in 2011, announced Wednesday that he plans to step down in June …

With the rapid spread of commerce on mobile devices, a key problem for merchants is getting customers to follow through with checkouts on tiny screens. PayPal Inc.’s answer to the problem is a solution that lets consumers check out with a single touch or click, and on Thursday it made …

The reduced interbank fee of 5.2 cents contained in the same-day settlement plan approved this week by members of NACHA, the regulatory body for the automated clearing house network, is likely to go down better with major merchants than the 8.2-cent fee contained in the original proposal. “The level of …

MasterCard Inc. on Tuesday launched a person-to-person payment service in the United States that will allow debit card holders to send money to any other individual with a debit card account, regardless of the card brand and with the money arriving nearly instantaneously. The new service, dubbed MasterCard Send, also …

The voting members of automated clearing house network regulator NACHA have approved a plan to allow for same-day settlement of ACH transactions, NACHA announced Tuesday. The same-day proposal, which has been debated since its introduction early last year, received “overwhelming support” in the balloting, says a NACHA spokesperson. NACHA does …

  Lost and stolen credit and debit cards equipped with EMV chips may become the bane of e-commerce merchants. As the U.S. payment-card industry begins its gargantuan migration to smart cards, counterfeit fraud at the point of sale should decrease. But fraud in other places very likely will increase. That’s …

By John Stewart Left for dead as recently as two years ago, the concept of mobile payments in physical stores is staging a remarkable resurrection. The signs are everywhere. In April, PayPal Inc. said it will adopt near-field communication (NFC) after years of mocking the technology, which enables wave-and-pay transactions …

Consumers expect restaurants to be the top merchant type to adopt mobile payments, especially as they envision it simplifying the payment process. That’s the finding of a survey from independent sales organization Harbortouch Payments LLC, which also products point-of-sale products for restaurants and other merchants. In the survey of 1,000 …

Electronic commerce hit a milestone in the first quarter by accounting for 7% of total retail sales for the first time, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Census Bureau reported Friday. Preliminary estimates from the Census Bureau pegged seasonally adjusted retail sales at $1.15 trillion, with e-commerce totaling $80.3 billion. In 2014’s …