At first glance, a press released headlined “Mastercard Drops Its Name” might lead one to believe Mastercard will be the anonymous payment network going forward. But no, Mastercard Inc. is simply removing its name from its familiar interlocking circles logo, the company announced Monday. The name-drop marks the second time …

Hotel operator and franchisor Marriott International Inc. reported Friday that 8.6 million encrypted payment card records were compromised in the big data breach it disclosed Nov. 30. Of those, 354,000 cards were unexpired. The card statistics are included in an update Bethesda, Md.-based Marriott issued about the breach of the …

It was a nasty December and fourth quarter, but transaction-processor stocks still beat the major market indexes in 2018, according to an analysis by Barrington Research Associates Inc. Twenty-six publicly traded processor stocks posted a mean return of 3.01% for the year versus a negative mean return of 6.24% for …

A big office lease in downtown Oakland, Calif., suggests merchant processor Square Inc. is about to embark on a big expansion. Square on Thursday signed a lease for an entire 356,000-square-foot building that once was a Sears department store and after that was briefly owned by the ride-sharing firm Uber. …

E-commerce, online bill payments, and other forms of card-not-present payments continued their strong growth last year to capture a bigger share of total card payments, according to newly released Federal Reserve data. The number of what the Fed calls remote payments using general-purpose payment cards grew 22.8% in 2017 from …

Click2Gov, a software application popular among municipalities for processing online payments of utility bills and fees, has been compromised in 46 U.S. cities and one Canadian location, according to an analysis released this week by Gemini Advisory. The New York City-based data-security firm estimates 294,929 payment card records have been …

After a lull of more than five months, merchant processor Square Inc. is resuming its attempt to obtain a bank charter. A spokesperson for San Francisco-based Square confirmed Wednesday morning that the company would refile its application the same day. Square in September 2017 filed for an industrial-bank charter from …

Big banks generally aren’t too thrilled about the Federal Reserve taking a direct operational role in a U.S. real-time payment system, but smaller banks and credit unions as well as some big companies support the idea. The Fed’s two-month comment period on its proposed Real Time Gross Settlement service closed …

Oversight of payment-processing software will change under detailed plans announced by the PCI Security Standards Council. In related news, the EMVCo standards body announced an update to its 3-D Secure standard for protecting card-not-present transactions. In a Friday blog post, the PCI Council said its pending PCI Secure Software Standard …

Banks and credit unions will face an uphill battle fighting account-application fraud in the next few years, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC. Boston-based Aite projects that financial institutions will spend $781 million in 2022 on services for thwarting credit card application fraud, up 40% from $557 …