Payments companies drove merger-and-acquisition activity in the financial-technology sector in 2019’s first nine months, according to a new analysis. Payments firms were involved in four of the top 10 deals tracked by New York City-based investment bank Berkery Noyes Securities LLC. The value of the payments mergers totaled $94.1 billion, …

Unattended-payments provider USA Technologies Inc. announced late Wednesday that it has filed overdue financial reports for its fiscal years 2019 and 2018 ended June 30, as well as several late quarterly reports. The company also restated financial data for some periods dating back to fiscal 2015. The new filings and …

Small and mid-sized businesses using Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks accounting software and payment-processing service will be able to get funds faster through Visa Inc.’s Visa Direct service, the companies announced Wednesday. Mountain View, Calif.-based Intuit rolled out Instant Deposit for its SMB customers using QuickBooks Payments. Instant Deposit uses the Visa …

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently notified cybersecurity companies about attacks that could defeat multifactor authentication systems protecting sensitive online personal and financial data, systems usually considered much stronger than two-factor authentication combinations such as user names and passwords. The FBI last month quietly sent a so-called private-industry notification (PIN)—a …

Confirming speculation that it was having second thoughts about officially joining the Libra Association, PayPal Holdings Inc. disclosed Friday afternoon that it was withdrawing from the controversial cryptocurrency project proposed by Facebook Inc. “PayPal has made the decision to forgo further participation in the Libra Association at this time and …

Payments executives love to talk about the security of paying with a smart phone, but that message still hasn’t gotten through to consumers, according to new survey findings from The Pew Charitable Trusts. The good news for mobile-payments proponents is that Pew found more than half, 56%, of its respondents …

Investors in payment stocks experienced something in September they don’t have to suffer through very often—two straight months of negative returns. A basket of 27 transaction-processor stocks tracked by Chicago-based Barrington Research Associates Inc. posted a negative mean return of 3.89% in September, considerably worse than three major stock-market indexes. …

The Shanghai-based UnionPay International payment network reported Monday that it now has 28 million accepting merchants outside of China and 120 million cards issued by non-mainland financial institutions since it launched its global business in 2004. But while UnionPay International now has a presence in 176 countries, with Chile and …

One of the longest-running antitrust lawsuits in the payments industry is getting into gear again with a new request by independent ATM deployers for class certification in their action against Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. The National ATM Council Inc. (NAC) trade group and 13 ATM independent sales organizations originally …

Merchant processor Square Inc. on Nov. 1 will drop its longstanding 2.75% point-of-sale rate for a new pricing plan of 2.6% plus 10 cents. Based on recent U.S. purchase dollar- and transaction-volume statistics from the bank card networks, Digital Transactions News calculates the new pricing plan will generate about 1% …