For the last four years, Square Cash has been a popular person-to-person payment app, but now Square Inc. is adding another function: buying and selling Bitcoin. The San Francisco payments company is testing the new feature with an undisclosed number of Square Cash users, according to the company and users’ …
Read More »Bitcoin Cements Its Volatile Tendencies After a Move To Boost Capacity Fails
Observers who wondered not long ago whether Bitcoin was too valuable to be a payment method may now be wondering whether it’s too volatile. The cryptocurrency has soared all year, reaching a peak near $7,800 only six days ago, but then it crashed hard, shedding about $2,000 in value by …
Read More »PayPal Suspends Operations on the TIO Network After Discovering ‘Security Vulnerabilities’
PayPal Holdings Inc.’s planned integration of its TIO Networks bill-pay operation hit a major snag late Friday when PayPal said it had shut down TIO’s system after the discovery of a security issue. Neither PayPal nor TIO released details about the issue. In a statement, PayPal said it involves “security …
Read More »Visa And Mastercard Grow In Europe As Issuers Drop Electron and Maestro Brands
As in the United States, Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. dominate card payments in Europe, but now the two U.S.-based card brands are growing on that continent partly at the expense of smaller brands they own. European issuers are systematically switching Visa Electron and Mastercard Maestro cards to simply Visa …
Read More »Square Cuts Its Net Loss in Half And Lays Stress on Selling to Large Merchants
Square Inc. is still losing money, but less so, and the company made it clear Wednesday its sights are firmly fixed on selling its products and services to larger merchants. “We’re not just about micro-merchants,” chief financial officer Sarah Friar told equity analysts in a conference call to discuss the …
Read More »Buoyed by a Strong Quarter, Green Dot Prepares Launches of Apple Pay Cash And Intuit Programs
Prepaid program manager Green Dot Corp. logged a strong quarter and now looks forward to big results from fresh deals with Apple Inc. and Intuit Inc., chief executive Steven W. Streit told stock analysts on Tuesday. Speaking on the same day Apple released a so-called public beta version of its …
Read More »Frequency of Breaches Points up Limited Capabilities of Cybersecurity Teams, Survey Says
Data breaches have grown so frequent that at least some observers have begun to question whether cybersecurity staffs within corporate and government entities are up to the challenge of stopping them. “You just have to look at the continued ubiquity of breaches in the headlines to know that we’re losing …
Read More »Bitcoin’s Runup Runs on As the Digital Currency Crashes Through the $7,000 Level
The U.S. payments community woke up Thursday morning to find Bitcoin setting yet another record, this time breaching the $7,000 level less than two weeks after soaring past $6,000. By mid-morning Central Time, the price stood at $7,132, according to Coindesk. The cryptocurrency is testing new highs in the wake …
Read More »VocaLink, PayPal, And P2P Will Help Propel Mastercard, the Network’s Boss Says
Mastercard Inc. enjoyed a strong third quarter, and Tuesday morning its top executive was not shy about celebrating some of the trends that he expects will further lift results for the world’s second-largest payment card network. These include recent acquisitions, a global partnership with PayPal Holdings Inc., and budding developments …
Read More »Eye on Innovation: Sound Payments; Vantiv’s Smart Pay Play; New Bill-Pay Vistas
A Cincinnati-based startup called LISNR is promoting technology that transmits payment data over sound waves. The technology, which the company demonstrated Tuesday at the Money 20/20 financial-technology conference in Las Vegas, is now open for beta and can be used as an alternative to near-field communication, the company said. It …
Read More »