Fraud-mitigation specialist Verifi released its “The Chargeback Triangle” report, completed by Javelin Strategy & Research, that found consumer disputes and chargebacks created $31 billion in financial losses in 2017, with merchants taking on almost $19 billion and issuing banks $12 billion. It also found that for every dollar in a …

The Western Union Co.’s Speedpay subsidiary announced the latest release of its Next Gen bill-payment platform. Card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. reported that first-quarter sales of credit and debit cards for the U.S. market fell 6.5% year-over-year, but U.S. prepaid card sales jumped 63%. The number of data breaches …

Blockchain provider Ripple Labs Inc. reported results on a number of pilots it is running for its XRapid cross-border payments network. Participants in the pilots have realized cost savings ranging from 40% to 70% compared to conventional fees. The average XRapid transaction took a little over two minutes, compared to two to …

Visa Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. have extended to Canada an agreement they made in 2016 that gives PayPal access to Visa’s tokenization engine in return for promoting Visa products for PayPal account funding. In related news, Visa said it is expanding its Visa Direct service in Canada, with processor …

Payments provider St. Louis Merchant Services announced it is offering the PayLo Cash Discount Progam from SignaPay Ltd. Fiserv Inc. has teamed with fraud-analytics firm Rippleshot to offer Card Risk Office, an early-detection service that allows client institutions to identify potential fraud anywhere from 30 days to 60 days before …

Google announced that Google Pay users soon will be able to use the service to make purchases within the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers. Once a card has been added to a Google Pay account, users don’t need to re-enter their payment info. If using Chrome, Google Pay can automatically …

Amazon.com Inc. said Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is generally available to U.S. merchants and developers. The service enables consumers using Alexa, the voice assistant embedded in Amazon’s Echo devices, to pay for purchases with information already stored in their Amazon accounts. Alexa users grant the merchant’s skill permission to …

Apple Inc. said revenue from its services, which includes Apple Pay, the App Store, Apple Music, and iCloud, surpassed $9 billion in its second quarter, besting by more than $2 billion the total a year ago. “Apple Pay continues its strong growth with active users more than doubling and transactions …

Toast, a 7-year-old provider of point-of-sale and payments software to restaurants, has launched its first POS device, a handheld that servers can use to accept payments and handle other functions. The device replaces a Samsung model the company used. Commerce platform Shopify Inc. reported transactions from mobile devices amounted to …

Zippy’s Restaurants said credit and debit card data, including cardholder names and numbers, may have been compromised in a “data-security incident” at its approximately two dozen locations in Hawaii between last Nov. 23 and March 29; the chain learned of the incident March 9. The Western Union Co. has added …