A report from the U.S. Department of Education shows that fees college students pay for campus-sponsored prepaid cards and deposit accounts can vary widely. The report was prepared by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for the Education Department and completed in February, but not released until Friday. The release came …
Read More »Hulu Becomes Venmo’s First TV-Streaming Merchant Acceptor
Television streaming service Hulu LLC says it now accepts PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo peer-to-peer payment service. Hulu could be a major win in PayPal’s ongoing effort to increase the popular Venmo’s profitability because the service will generate a recurring revenue stream. Founded in 2007, Santa Monica, Calif.-based Hulu competes with …
Read More »NACHA Wants the Fed To Take a Broader View of Faster Payments
NACHA is not taking a position on whether the Federal Reserve should build a proposed real-time settlement system, but in comments this week the automated clearing house governing body said it is concerned the Fed’s current proposal is “too narrowly focused” and favors instant payments at the expense of other …
Read More »Processor Shares Fell Again in November, But Not As Much As in October
Shares of transaction-processing companies lost ground in November for the second month in a row, but the decline wasn’t nearly as great as October’s 10% plunge, according to new data from Barrington Research Associates Inc. The Chicago-based investment firm says share prices of a group of 26 publicly traded transaction …
Read More »European Merchants Would Pay 40% Less to Accept U.S.-Issued Cards Under Visa-Mastercard Proposals
European merchants could see their costs to accept Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. payment cards issued outside of Europe decline by 40% under separate proposals submitted by the two leading card networks to settle competition concerns raised by European Union antitrust authorities. The European Commission, the administrative arm of the …
Read More »Starwood Breach Raises the Question of Whether Hackers Have Keys to Encrypted Data
Friday’s disclosure from hotel giant Marriott International Inc. that hackers compromised information on up to 500 million guests held in its Starwood reservation system raises the question of whether fraudsters will be able to use an unknown quantity of encrypted payment card numbers because they also might have stolen the …
Read More »The PCI Council Publishes Updated Guidance for Securing Telephone-Based Payments
Online and mobile payments get all the press, but plenty of card-not-present payments still originate from telephone orders. The security threats from such orders are changing, which prompted the PCI Security Standards Council to issue an update Wednesday to guidance it first produced seven years ago for protecting phone-based payments. …
Read More »Visa’s Counterfeit Fraud Declines, But Some Other EMV Measures Signal a Conversion Lull
Counterfeit fraud losses continue to decline, according to Visa Inc.’s latest report about the U.S. conversion to the EMV chip card standard. But Visa’s EMV dollar volume was lower in September than in June, and the number of merchants that accept chip cards remained unchanged at 3.1 million. Visa says …
Read More »British Competition Regulators Probe PayPal’s Takeover of iZettle
The United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority announced Monday that its initial investigation has found that PayPal Holdings Inc.’s September acquisition of Swedish processor iZettle AB could reduce competition or raise prices in the payments market. But whether the antitrust regulator will unwind the deal is far from certain. “While …
Read More »Consumers’ Small Business Saturday Spending Rose 38% This Year, AmEx Reports
After slipping the previous two years, spending at independent shops and restaurants jumped 38% to an estimated $17.8 billion on Small Business Saturday, American Express Co. and the National Federation of Independent Business trade group reported Monday. AmEx founded the Saturday-after-Thanksgiving promotion in 2010 to highlight locally owned businesses in …
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