Two prominent names in payment card security, ControlScan Inc. and EchoSat Inc., announced Thursday that they will merge. The combined companies, to operate under the ControlScan name, will service more than 775,000 card-accepting merchants across North America. ControlScan works with merchant acquirers and payment processors to provide merchants with a …

With little fanfare, so-called behavioral biometrics began appearing on the radar screens of payment card security executives about two years ago. Now, however, experts predict behavioral biometrics will assume a more prominent role in protecting payment transactions as e-commerce and mobile commerce continue gaining share of retail sales and the …

Merchants’ actual fraud costs are up for the third year in a row and their total fraud-related expenses also are rising, according to the latest True Cost of Fraud study from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Fraud as a percentage of the revenues reported by the 653 retailer risk-control executives surveyed for …

With e-commerce taking an ever-greater share of total retail sales and mobile commerce accounting for an ever-greater share of e-commerce, merchants need to start treating m-commerce fraud control as more than a subset of online fraud control. That was the word Tuesday from Susan Pandy, the director of payment strategies …

Consumers may like the leading payment brands, especially Visa, but they don’t connect with them on an emotional level, according to new research findings from payments-industry consulting firm The Strawhecker Group. Asked if they “have any emotional connection” to any of the brands, some 77% of TSG’s respondents said no. …

Shareholders of MoneyGram International Inc. voted overwhelmingly in favor of Ant Financial Services Group’s planned $1.2 billion acquisition of their company, Dallas-based MoneyGram announced Tuesday. A preliminary tally shows 97% of the shares voted were in favor of the deal and represented more than 82% of all outstanding shares, MoneyGram …

Thanks in part to its acquisition of a Florida independent sales organization nearly a year ago, merchant acquirer JetPay Corp. on Monday reported that its first-quarter revenues increased 63% to $18.9 million from $11.6 million in the year-ago period. JetPay’s Payment Services segment, its biggest unit, saw revenues jump by …

Prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp. reported higher purchase volumes and card numbers in the first quarter while merchant acquirer CardConnect Corp. posted a 23% increase in bank card dollar volume. Purchase volumes on Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot’s cards totaled $5.5 billion, up 17% from $4.71 billion in 2016’s …

Expanding on an acceptance relationship that began last October at high-end merchant locations in California and New York, processor First Data Corp. on Tuesday said it will offer its 4 million U.S. merchants in-store acceptance of the Chinese online and mobile-payment service Alipay, which is used by 450 million people …

First Data Corp. reported Monday that transaction volume in its North American merchant-acquiring business grew 7% year-over-year in the first quarter to 11.5 billion. Attrition in First Data’s direct small and mid-sized (SMB) merchant business, which had been a problem for more than a year, improved, but sales leads from …