Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
PayPal Holdings Inc.’s big news in November was that U.S. users of its Venmo wallet will be able to pay with Venmo on Amazon.com Inc.’s massive marketplace and on the Amazon shopping app, starting in 2022. The news comes as the latest development in a long effort PayPal has engaged …
Blog Archives
December, 2021
November, 2021
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1 November
Payments 3.0: The Chips are Down. So Are the Cards
Wallets could be a lot emptier by this time next year, and it will have nothing to do with the spending capacity of consumers. As Digital Transactions reported in September (“Out of the Chips”), a pandemic-driven shortage in computer chips is hitting the payments industry. Now, as cards expire, issuers …
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1 November
Security Notes: Quantum Money: Good News, Bad News
Quantum entities are fundamentally offensive to our experience and intuition. They are like a four-dimensional physical universe. We can’t imagine a world with length, width, and height plus a fourth dimension. But we can handle this notion mathematically. The same is true for quantum entities. The illustrious Richard Feynman, one …
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1 November
Specialized Players Claim a Rising Share of Merchant Acquiring
Despite a temporary setback at the start of the pandemic, merchant acquiring is getting back on a growth track that will see revenue expand at an 11.3% annual clip through 2025, nearly equaling the 11.8% rate chalked up from 2015 to 2019, according to a report and forecast released last …
October, 2021
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1 October
Payments 3.0: Three Keys to Crypto Acceptance
When the enigmatic Satoshi Nakamoto launched Bitcoin in 2009, it seemed that the U.S. dollar and other currencies would have a new competitor. However, radical forecasts of digital currencies becoming the coin of the realm have not come to pass. Will Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies take their place alongside cash …
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1 October
Security Notes: The Root of Quantum Mystery
Random means without order. Strange that disorder serves as the foundation for the most comprehensive order of nature: modern physics. Physics today asserts that, concerning the microcosmos, what happens next is totally unpredictable per individual event. Only the behavior of a group of events is subject to prediction. Matter behaves …
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1 October
A Busy Affirm Tests a New Debit Card
Will a debit card be coming soon from Affirm Inc.? A new card product that taps the user’s checking account for in-full purchases or installments is in beta testing with “several hundred people,” at buy now, pay later specialist Affirm Holdings Inc., the company’s chief executive, Max Levchin, told equity …
September, 2021
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1 September
Payments 3.0: How the Prepaid Rule Tipped the Market
The prepaid market has been upended and shrunk by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s prepaid accounts rule. Prepaid cards were a popular money-management tool for low-income Americans. And even though the cards never generated many complaints, the bureau decided they needed to be heavily regulated. Now, direct-to-consumer prepaid cards are …
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1 September
Security Notes: Quantum Unknown: A Cautionary Tale
When automotive vehicles came on the road, they were described as “fast horses.” When the transistor replaced the vacuum tube, it was described as a “smaller switch.” And now that quantum computers are in the offing, they are being described as “faster computing machines.” We know very well that the …
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1 September
The DoJ on Debit Routing: A Tougher Rule, Please
The U.S. Department of Justice in August lent its weight to a proposed rule from the Federal Reserve Board that would reinforce merchants’ choice of networks for e-commerce transactions arising from debit cards. At the same time, it suggested the rule could be made more stringent. Justice’s support for the …
