Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

A real-time payments system featuring tokenized transactions opened to all comers on Wednesday when Houston-based BBVA Compass Bank announced its connection with processor Dwolla Inc. is live for commercial use. “We’ve been in a live environment [with BBVA] for the last two to three weeks with friends and family but …

  Chicago-based Trustwave Holdings Inc. has a new owner. Singapore Telecommunications Ltd. is buying privately-held Trustwave for $810 million, Singtel announced Tuesday. Singtel placed an $850 million value on Trustwave. It will buy 98% of the firm with Trustwave chairman and chief executive Robert J. McCullen retaining 2%. Trustwave, which …

  As the U.S. payment card industry continues its monumental shift to EMV chip card technology, one group of merchants will lag. More than 70% of small merchants will not be EMV compliant by Oct. 1, the date the card networks have set to shift liability for point-of-sale fraud to …

  Card-linked offers appear to be gaining consumer favor, according to results of a survey from the CardLinx Association, a Burlingame, Calif.-based trade group. Over the past 12 months, consumer use of card-linked offers increased 92%, the association said. It surveyed more than 50 companies. Other survey results show 95% …

Microsoft Corp. may bring impressive technical chops as it enters the mobile-payments race, but if ever there were a David up against Goliaths, it’s now the Redmond, Wash.-based computing giant. News broke last week that Microsoft has used a company called Microsoft Payments Inc. to apply for money-transmission licenses with …

Prepaid cards may find favor among younger consumers, one survey finds, while another reports prepaid card programs sport a wide range of fees. Also, armored-car company Brink’s has jumped into the prepaid card mix. Fees on 31 prepaid card programs surveyed by Bankrate.com are scattershot, with the types and amounts …

By Jim Daly With the U.S. payment card industry’s eyes glued on the coming of EMV chip cards, the main standards body for card security is trying to remind merchant acquirers, merchants, and card issuers that there is more to security than simply embedding a chip into a piece of …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group and chip-maker Intel Corp. will work on producing a tablet that supports EMV chip card and near-field communication (NFC) transactions, Ingenico announced Thursday. The tablet is in response to the U.S. payment card migration to the EMV chip card standard, and the growing adoption of …

By Jim Daly Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc.’s outspoken chief executive Bob Carr weighed in Friday with a statement on Indiana’s controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Carr says the law could relegate some people to “second-class status” and is an “invitation to discriminate.” “It is deeply troubling that the …

As Transact 15, the Electronic Transactions Association’s annual conference held this year in San Francisco gets under way, acquiring industry vendors and companies are releasing a bevy of news. Among the vendors making announcements is Clearent LLC, a payment-services company based in Clayton, Mo. Clearent says it will resell CardFlight …

By John Stewart EMV chip cards and mobile payments may be two abiding passions of the payments industry these days, but major merchants are far from sold on either technology, judging by comments from a number of them Tuesday at a payments-technology conference. Most big retailers are gearing up for …

  It’s a familiar refrain in payments: For consumers to use a payment method there has to be places to use it. Apple Pay, it seems even with all of the hoopla surrounding it, is no different. That’s what a recent report from Phoenix Marketing International, a Rhineback, N.Y.-based firm, …

After long belittling near-field communication technology by joking that its acronym, NFC, stands for “Not for Commerce,” PayPal Inc. before the end of the year will launch a new version of its mobile wallet featuring the technology. PayPal, which has been working with NFC in Australia, will replace its current …

Visa Inc.’s U.S. payment card issuers had about 48 million EMV chip cards in the market as of Dec. 31, a Visa executive said Wednesday. And, somewhat surprisingly, about 80% of the small number of U.S. EMV transactions today are coming from small merchants rather than big retailers, which are …

By Jim Daly A California independent sales organization called CardFlex Inc. and its two principals have settled federal charges that they allegedly processed more than $26 million in unauthorized charges for a company known as I Works. CardFlex strongly denied the FTC's charges and said it settled in order to …

Mobile point-of-sale service developer CardFlight Inc. will make an EMV chip card-compatible mobile POS reader available in the second quarter, in anticipation of the Oct. 1 liability shift. That’s the date card fraud at the point of sale is scheduled to shift to the party least prepared for it. The …

A near-doubling of attempted wire-transfer fraud and strong corporate support for the chip-and-PIN variety of EMV card payments are among the highlights of the latest payments-fraud study from the Association for Financial Professionals. The recently released study by the Bethesda, Md.-based AFP, an association of corporate treasury managers and finance …

The number of mobile-payments users in the United States is growing steadily, but most mobile-phone owners still find other payment methods more convenient, and the frequency of payment use with phones is still low. These are among the conclusions of a Federal Reserve consumer survey conducted in December that also …

  Smart phones may become a strong ally to fraud-plagued e-commerce merchants in helping to verify the location and identity of an online shopper. Online fraud is often committed by criminals who manipulate their computer’s location data and other attributes to make it appear they are who they say they …

Merchants face relentless and ever-changing attempts to make fraudulent online transactions, but measuring the effectiveness of rules in place to counter those attempts takes time. Now, CyberSource, a unit of Visa Inc., is offering a service called Decision Manager Replay that lets merchants test various anti-fraud measures for online transactions …