Visa Inc. has been talking up contactless payments lately, though its executives and spokespersons usually dole out percentages rather than hard numbers to describe what is still a minuscule market in terms of card numbers and transaction volume. But chief executive Alfred F. Kelly gave an eyebrow-raising statistic Wednesday regarding …
Read More »WEX To Acquire Bill-Pay and Virtual Card Specialist Noventis
Fleet-fueling and corporate-payments provider WEX Inc. reported this week that it has a deal to acquire Noventis Inc., a bill-payment network and virtual card specialist. South Portland, Maine-based WEX said in a news release that it already has a “longstanding relationship” with Noventis as a supplier of virtual cards for …
Read More »The Zelle P2P Payment Service Posts 83% Transaction Growth in the Third Quarter
The Zelle person-to-person payment service continued to gain traction in the third quarter. Zelle Network reported Tuesday that it processed $32 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30 on 116 million transactions. The latest figures represent a year-over-year growth rate of 67% in payment value and 83% in transactions. …
Read More »NCR To Take a Direct Role in Payments With its Pending $184 Million Acquisition of JetPay
Best known for its ATMs, NCR Corp. has long been close to the point-of-sale payment business with its software products such as Retail One, Aloha, and NCR Silver, and its hardware for retailers and the hospitality industry that includes self-checkout systems for grocery stores. Now NCR is about to dive …
Read More »AmEx’s Discount Revenues and Profits Rise on Healthy Cardholder Spending
Strong cardholder spending generated higher discount revenue and contributed to a 22% profit increase at American Express Co. in the third quarter. AmEx late Thursday reported that U.S. card-billed business rose 10% to $194.6 billion from $176.4 billion a year earlier. International volume rose 5% to $100.1 billion, bringing AmEx’s …
Read More »ACI’s Payments Hub Lands BMO Financial Group as a User
Payment processor ACI Worldwide Inc. reported Thursday that Toronto-based BMO Financial Group, the parent company of Bank of Montreal and Chicago’s Harris Bank, has rolled out ACI’s payments hub, which can connect banks to real-time payment services. The rollout took nine months, which BMO and Naples, Fla.-based ACI characterized as …
Read More »Paya Unveils Its Paya Connect Platform for ISOs And Software Firms
Shortly after the former Sage Payment Solutions rebranded as Paya early this year, company president Greg Cohen said the merchant processor would play a “value game,” not a low-price game. Following that strategy, Paya on Wednesday unveiled Paya Connect, a platform for software firms and independent sales organizations to create …
Read More »Dear Diary: Why Did Payment Transactions Decline in October 2017?
Unless you’re talking about check-writing or cash usage, just about every measure of transactions and volumes in payments is up, up, up these days. But a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta says consumers actually made fewer payments in October 2017 than they did a year earlier. …
Read More »Eye on Transactions: Strong Consumer Spending Lifts Payment Cards at Chase, Citi, and Wells
With the economy still humming along, three of the nation’s biggest banks on Friday reported healthy increases in third-quarter payment card purchase volumes. JPMorgan Chase & Co., owner of the nation’s biggest bank-run merchant acquirer, posted $343.8 billion in merchant-processing volume, a 14% increase from $301.6 billion in 2017’s third …
Read More »ATM Surcharges Rise Again, but Foreign Fees Ease
The average ATM surcharge increased this year for the 14th year in a row, but ATM foreign fees eased a bit, according to Bankrate Inc.’s latest annual study of ATM and checking account fees. New York City-based Bankrate says the average surcharge is now $3.02, up 5 cents, or 1.7%, …
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