Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

It’s best known for its Gift Card Mall displays of retailer gift cards and other prepaid cards in grocery stores, but prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. is a force in general-purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards. It had a GPR business even before 2010, when it launched its …

Global payment gateway provider Adyen processed more than $14 billion in global payments in 2013, a 40% increase from $10 billion in 2012, the company recently announced. n Mobile transactions in particular are growing for the Amsterdam-based company, and taking a larger share of overall transactions. Mobile payments accounted for …

The board of directors of eBay Inc. is “unified” in opposing a proposal from famed activist investor Carl Icahn that the company spin off its PayPal Inc. unit, eBay chief executive John Donahoe told analysts Wednesday afternoon. Calling the proposed separation a “distraction” coming just as eBay is trying to …

The recently disclosed data breaches at Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus Group have breathed new life into an industry dispute over how to account for network choice in routing EMV debit transactions. The ATM Industry Association on Tuesday issued a statement critical of MasterCard Inc. for earlier this month declaring …

The number of credit and debit cards compromised in 2013’s data breaches was on track by mid-December to be more than double the number of cards compromised in 2012, but then along came Target Corp.’s massive breach that exposed 40 million more. Thus, the Identity Theft Resource Center now estimates …

  A 17-year-old Russian boy is behind the malware that has wreaked havoc at Target Corp., says IntelCrawler LLC, a Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based data-security company. In a release posted on its Web site Friday, IntelCrawler disclosed that it tracked down the alleged hacker via its own sources, including chat transcripts …

Against a backdrop of knotty problems besetting the U.S. introduction of EMV, a financial-services standards body is investigating the potential for a set of non-proprietary chip card rules for EMV debit routing. n The group also broke up into subgroups during the meeting, which was held Dec. 9-10 at the …

A new research report from Celent LLC estimates that the number of consumers using the mobile variant of remote deposit capture (RDC) nearly doubled in 2013 and predicts that users will triple by 2016 to 61 million. Along with documenting its growth, however, the report says remote capture is sustaining …

The huge data breach at Target Corp. and now one at upscale department store Neiman Marcus Group and possibly other retailers has introduced many Americans to the term “EMV” and the possibility that more secure Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip cards will replace vulnerable magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards in the United States. …

U.S. retailers and businesses using Roam Data Inc.’s mobile point-of-sale card reader and its software have a new tool to manage multiple readers. Boston-based Roam released Monday ROAMmcm 5, a platform for controlling the payment card readers that attach to smart phones and tablets. n With it, entities can set …

Hoping to build off its security reputation, The Brink’s Company announced Tuesday it launched Brink’s Checkout, an e-commerce payment service in conjunction with 2Checkout.com Inc., an e-commerce payment-services company. The famed armored-car company will market and sell Brink’s Checkout, while 2Checkout will provide the payment processing, oversee the merchant application …

In a bid to streamline its payment process for online retailers, PayPal Inc. is testing a service that lets users pay and check out without leaving the merchant’s site. Dubbed “in-context checkout,” the service, which is designed to work on tablets and mobile phones as well as laptops and desktops, …

Target Corp. on Friday said personal data on 70 million customers were compromised in a separate theft during the same data breach it disclosed last month that exposed up to 40 million credit and debit card accounts of U.S. shoppers. That could bring the total number of customers affected up …

Shopify Inc.’s recent move to offer its merchants a mobile point-of-sale application marks yet another entry in a market that has filled up fast with competitors ranging from PayPal Inc. to Square Inc. and dozens in between. “You would think we’d reached everybody [with mobile POS products], but we haven’t,” …

America’s mass-transit systems in early 2014 are continuing their migration away from proprietary fare systems and toward so-called open-fare systems that can accept general-purpose payment cards as well as mobile payments. This week, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, locally known as Metro, awarded a $184 million, 8-year contract to …

A mobile point-of-sale service called Sequoia is promising card-present transaction rates for merchants using it, says developer 1Oak Technologies. n Using technology already inside smart phones, the app then creates an encrypted radio wave that is picked up by the Sequoia receiver attached to the payment terminal. That device creates …

The smoke seemed to clear a bit this week on the status of electronic payments for Colorado shops selling now-legal recreational marijuana, but the nascent merchant category still remains in what effectively is a legal no man’s land between conflicting state and federal laws. Some 20 states and the District …

The online payment card authentication technology known as Three Domain, or 3-D, Secure, and marketed as MasterCard SecureCode and Verified by Visa, have mixed impacts on e-commerce conversion rates around the world, according to a joint study commissioned by international payment gateway Adyen and consulting firm Edgar, Dunn & Co. …

Noting the success Starbucks Corp. has had with its prepaid card and mobile app, Mercury Payment Systems LLC figures the small merchants it serves would like to create a similar program but lack Starbucks’s considerable resources. To bring such a program within reach, the Durango, Colo.-based merchant processor this week …

The Bitcoin virtual currency continued its march toward the payments mainstream with the recent announcement by online game developer Zynga Inc. that it would test Bitcoin acceptance with some of its popular games. n “In response to Bitcoin’s rise in popularity around the world, Zynga, with help from BitPay, is …