Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Last year was a rocky one for eBay Inc., and on Wednesday the company announced it will do some streamlining: In the first quarter, the PayPal Inc. parent company, which reported a $41 million net loss for 2014, will lop off 2,400 jobs across all of its operating units, or …

The United States with its several thousand credit and debit card issuers and more than a dozen payment networks presents a stiff challenge to the card industry as it tries to convert from magnetic-stripe stripe cards to Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards, two industry veterans told a group of independent sales …

Price compression in the merchant-acquiring business is nothing new, but research from First Annapolis Consulting shows it may be much more intense than previously thought. “The price point that an acquirer must present to sign a new merchant is falling and falling dramatically in the very segments most acquirers would …

Merchants battling debit card pricing and routing rules suffered another defeat on Tuesday. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a petition from a merchant group seeking to have the high court hear its arguments against Federal Reserve rules regulating debit card interchange and transaction routing. The move leaves intact a lower-court …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group now owns all of Roam Data, a mobile POS company it first invested in in 2009. France-based Ingenico says the Roam brand will continue to be used on products, but the company name will be wrapped up into Ingenico. “With 100% of Roam, we will …

Apple Inc.’s much anticipated Watch, which includes a near-field communication (NFC) chip for making contactless payments, will be protected by a four-digit PIN, reports Australian Web site CSO. Apple Watch users will need to enter the passcode to use Apple Pay on the watch, the site says. It remains unclear …

By Jim Daly After a hiatus of more than three years, vending machines that get payment services through USA Technologies Inc. will soon be accepting MasterCard Inc.’s debit cards again as the result of an agreement between the two companies that USA Technologies announced Friday. Under the three-year agreement, “MasterCard …

Major tech and payments companies are reportedly showing an interest in acquiring Softcard, the troubled mobile-payments joint venture owned by three of the nation’s biggest mobile operators. Google Inc. is in “exclusive” talks with the company and has offered at least $50 million for it, The Wall Street Journal reported …

The number of anticipated wearable devices that can be used as payment devices has increased by one with the debut of the Wirecard Smart Band from processor Wirecard AG. Munich, Germany-based Wirecard is using host card emulation, a variant of near-field communication, in its devices. With HCE, banks and other …

Some cybercrooks are nothing if not accommodating. A new version of the so-called ransomware called CyberWall, for example, has made it easier for victims to make payments and get their data back. CyberWall 3.0, released early this week, includes new gateways for reaching the decryption site. The ransom note file …

PayPal Inc. updated its reader for its PayPal Here mobile point-of-sale service with Windows 8.1 support and separately plans to release software to integrate reader support into iOS and Android apps. Introduced in 2012, PayPal Here enables merchants to use their smart phones and tablets as payment-acceptance devices. The inclusion …

By Jim Daly U.S. credit and debit card issuers will be mailing hundreds of millions of Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards to their customers this year and next now that the payment card networks’ EMV liability shift looms just eight months away. Estimates about chip card issuance vary, but all involve …

CKE Restaurants Inc., parent of the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains, and TGI Fridays Inc. are using Microsoft Corp. technology to speed up the ordering and purchase process in their restaurants, the Redmond, Wash.-based computing giant announced on Monday. Carrollton, Texas-based TGI Fridays is putting 8-inch tablets into the …

No one can say for sure why the price of Bitcoin has dived sharply since the turn of the year, but that doesn’t mean market observers don’t have theories. These range from rampant short selling to the hack last week at Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp, in which crooks siphoned out $5.2 …

Several payments-industry vendors are making product and services announcements in conjunction with the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show convention this week in New York. Verifone unveiled the PayWare Mobile e355, a mobile point-of-sale terminal that accepts magnetic stripe, near-field communication (NFC), Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV), and Apple Pay transactions. Available in …

In the wake of a barrage of data thefts affecting tens of millions of U.S. citizens, President Barack Obama on Monday proposed national legislation to regulate breach notification. Other legislation proposed by Obama would ban companies from selling student data to other organizations for non-educational uses and from using information …

Softcard, the mobile-payments venture of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA, has laid of 60 employees in a restructuring, according to media reports. The layoffs raise questions about the future of Softcard, formerly known as Isis, which has had trouble gaining consumer and merchant acceptance for its near-field communication-based …

Card-not-present fraud is the bane of any merchant that operates an e-commerce site, and EMVCo, a standards body for the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) specification, hopes its newly assumed oversight of the 3D Secure authentication standard can help them. Operated as Visa Inc.’s Verified by Visa and MasterCard Inc.’s SecureCode, 3D Secure …

  Merchant-services company BluePay Processing Inc. has bought CDI Technology Corp., which provides e-commerce software and payment services for companies that use business-management software such as Oracle JD Edwards and SAP. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Lombard, Ill.-based CDI integrates e-commerce and payments into business-management software, often called …

By Digital Transactions News Staff Bolstered by solid growth in the U.S. and Asia, merchant processor Global Payments Inc. on Thursday reported total revenues of $697.3 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2015 ended Nov. 30, up 10% from $634.1 million a year earlier. Second-quarter net income increased only …