Wednesday , January 15, 2025

John Stewart

Starting as an editor on Bank Network News at Faulkner & Gray, John ultimately played a key role in starting, editing, and publishing many of F&G's flagship publications, including Credit Card Management, Card Technology, Card Marketing, and Collections & Credit Risk. Before co-founding Boland Hill Media, John was a group publisher at Thomson Media responsible for a $10 million division embracing magazines, newsletters, and Web sites.

Fiserv Looks for Synergies in Its $690 Million Deal to Buy U.S. Bancorp’s Debit And ATM Assets

U.S. Bancorp is selling its ATM managed-services and debit-servicing businesses to Fiserv Inc. for a price that the parties say is “approximately” $690 million. The assets Fiserv is acquiring, which are part of U.S. Bancorp’s Elan Financial Services unit, also include the MoneyPass surcharge-free ATM network, which links 33,000 machines …

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PayPal Says It Is Shutting Down Payments for the Controversial Infowars Properties

The payments business has become even more complicated than usual in recent years by politics, a point driven home on Friday when PayPal Holdings Inc. announced it will stop processing payments for the controversial Infowars Web site and related properties. “We do not take these actions lightly and we work …

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How iZettle Could Boost PayPal’s Long-Held Strategy to Embrace the Physical Point of Sale

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 …

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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, …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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