For years, PayPal Holdings Inc. has worked to expand its reach to physical merchants, and now, with the closing on Thursday of its $2.2 billion acquisition of Stockholm-based iZettle AB, the digital-payments company is taking a significant step in achieving that ambition. At a stroke, the acquisition brings to PayPal …
Read More »As Transaction Volume Grows, NACHA Smooths out the Road for Same-Day ACH
With volume building for same-day processing of automated clearing house items, the regulatory body for the extensive ACH network announced Monday a trio of enhancements aimed at, among other things, raising the dollar limit on the faster transfers and making credit funds available faster during the processing day. The changes, …
Read More »Face-to-Face Debit Fraud Fell 5.5% Last Year As EMV Took Hold, the Latest Pulse Survey Shows
Good news for debit card issuers emerged Thursday as a major report indicated fraud losses fell in 2017 compared to 2016. Losses on point-of-sale transactions totaled an estimated $850 million, down 5.5% from the 2016 total, according to the 2018 Debit Issuer Study from the Houston-based Pulse Network, a unit …
Read More »How Fraudsters Are Increasingly Harnessing Mobile Devices And Bots
Payments officials have sensed it for some time, and now the numbers confirm it: Fraud attacks via mobile devices worldwide soared 24% in the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2017, totaling 150 million. In the United States alone, the increase was much worse, fully …
Read More »In a Heated Merchant Market, PayPal Rolls Out Funding ‘Within Seconds’ for Select Merchants
The topic of faster payments has won plenty of publicity in recent years, but less celebrated is the mundane business of crediting merchant accounts. That’s getting faster, too, and the latest development is a service called Funds Now, which PayPal Holdings Inc. announced Tuesday. With this service, online merchants in …
Read More »A Financial-Industry Standards Body Releases Rules Aimed at Tightening Mobile Security
Mobile payments are booming in places like China and India, but in the United States, not so much. Year after year, one reason that keeps popping up in surveys is concerns about security, and on Tuesday a major standards body announced a measure aimed squarely at those fears. The Accredited …
Read More »Data Breaches Register on the Stock Market, Too, And Payments Firms Are Hardest Hit
Data breaches bring a slew of bad consequences for the victim, not the least of which are the costs of lost business, remediation, and, possibly, litigation. But for publicly held entities, there’s an additional risk: a lasting hit to the share price. For 24 companies whose shares are traded on …
Read More »Bitcoin Has Calmed Down—And Fees Have Gotten Cheaper—But Will Merchants Bite?
For all the gyrations Bitcoin and its enthusiasts have experienced over the past 12 months, the digital currency has managed to trace a relatively calm track lately. It remains, however, an acquired taste for users, and while some independent sales organizations have begun efforts in recent weeks to sell it …
Read More »Badran Exits As President of Alipay U.S. As Alipay Enjoys a Booming Summer Overseas
July and August are big vacation months in China, and this year Chinese travelers’ use of the Alipay mobile-payment service boomed as users ventured abroad, according to figures released Wednesday. In related news, China’s Ant Financial Services Group confirmed on Wednesday that Souheil Badran, who had headed up Alipay’s expansion …
Read More »Fingerprint Scanning Will Have to Move Over for Facial And Voice ID, Research Says
With mobile-payments volume increasing while confidence in passwords slumps, researchers are predicting big growth for mobile authentication via biometric technology such as facial or voice recognition. In one forecast, from the United Kingdom-based firm Juniper Research, the number of mobile users authenticating themselves by such technology will grow over the …
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