Bank card merchant acquirers participating in American Express Co.’s OptBlue program signed 1 million small businesses for AmEx acceptance last year, an AmEx executive tells Digital Transactions News. The push came as New York City-based AmEx drives toward chief executive Kenneth I. Chenault’s goal of having AmEx’s merchant base reach …

Starbucks Corp. showcased it, and now more and more restaurants are adding mobile order-ahead and payment services in an effort to generate new business—and payments firms are only too happy to help them. “Restaurants and other retail merchants are realizing that mobile order ahead is a new sales channel with …

While President Donald J. Trump has promised to build a wall along the southern U.S. border to stop illegal immigrants and have Mexico pay for it, an Alabama Congressman’s bill would provide financial support from people in the U.S. sending funds to Mexico and 41 other countries or territories. And …

Nearly three-fourths of corporate treasury and finance executives say their organizations were hit by actual or attempted payment fraud in 2016, with check, automated clearing house debit, and email fraud attempts all rising, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ ninth annual payments fraud survey. Some 74% of respondents said …

Consulting firm The Strawhecker Group is out with its 2016 rankings of U.S. merchant acquirers, and they show that 240 acquirers and independent sales organizations processed more than $5 trillion in payment volume. The 10 biggest acquirers accounted for 80% of that volume. Topping the list is JPMorgan Chase & …

Co-Op Financial Services, the big credit-union service organization based in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., announced Monday that it had acquired Des Moines, Iowa-based payment processor TMG for $100 million. Co-Op had been the minority owner of TMG, until recently known as The Members Group, and bought out the rest of the …

In the United States, contactless payments are virtually synonymous with mobile payments. In other countries, contactless payments usually mean tap-and-go transactions with a plastic debit or credit card. In the United Kingdom, for example, spending on contactless cards reached a record £3.4 billion ($4.2 billion at current exchange rates) in …

While independent sales organizations often say they want to compete on more than just price, pricing remains the main sales tool for many. But a growing number of ISOs and merchant acquirers are looking to add non-processing components to their product line-ups to attract and retain merchants. Several providers of …

The migration of payment card fraud to the Internet in the wake of EMV chip cards coming to the point of sale is not new, but new findings from a company that specializes in card-not-present risk control and chargeback reduction provide insights on the breadth of the problem and offer …

The name might evoke yawns, but the messaging standard known as ISO 20022 will be playing an increasingly important role in electronic payments in the future. The standard goes beyond bare-bones data related to a payment to facilitate the exchange of more information. The Federal Reserve Banks are encouraging more …