Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Amazon.com Inc. introduced Prime Reload, a service that lets Amazon Prime members earn a 2% reward when they reload their Amazon Gift Card balance with a debit card. The reward is added to the gift card balance. Users must give Amazon their debit card, bank-account, and bank-routing numbers when they sign up.
• Mobile-device authentication specialist Payfone said it has been awarded a patent for its technology that detects and warns financial institutions about SIM-swapping, a rapidly growing form of mobile-payments fraud.
• Payments provider North American Bancard Holdings Inc. announced the Redfox POS, software designed for restaurants, is available to users of NAB Velocity, the company’s payments platform.
• Fleet-fueling payments processor Wex Inc. announced a collaboration with GasBuddy, a mobile app that helps consumers track fuel prices. The companies expect to announce later this year how the partnership is working toward a consumer-facing product.
• Citigroup Inc.’s Citi Retail Services unit and ExxonMobil Corp. announced what they are calling an “Apply and Buy” feature that lets users of the ExxonMobil Speedpass+ mobile-payments app apply for the ExxonMobil Smart Card credit card directly through the app, allowing them to begin saving on fuel purchases.
• Merchant processor iPayment Inc. has agreed to offer funding from business lender RapidAdvance to its more than 140,000 merchant clients.
• Sourcepoint, a platform that allows publishers to charge for premium content, launched AltPay, a service that allows consumers to pay for ad-free content.
• Encryption provider Bluefin Payment Systems released a case study on point-to-point encryption as used by Two Men and a Truck.
• InstaMed, an independent sales organization specializing in health-care payments services, released its 2016 Trends in Healthcare Payments Annual Report that found that 68% of consumers prefer electronic payment methods to pay their medical bills, and 80% of consumers prefer online payment methods to pay their health-plan premiums.
• In a ranking of customer satisfaction with bank and credit card mobile apps, J.D. Power found that Capital One, with a score of 870, topped the list among retail banks. The report also found that 69% of consumers used a mobile-payment service in the past 30 days.
