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.

As Bitcoin Struggles With Congestion, BitPay Looks To Add More Crypto Choices

With Bitcoin priced near $18,000 Friday morning, and with futures markets already trading Bitcoin contracts or getting set to, investors in the digital currency are riding high. Consumers who want to use Bitcoin to buy things, though, face a market rife with volatility, slow transactions, and high costs. Bitcoin exchanges …

Read More »

In Making Its App Work With Apple’s Face ID, Discover Could Tap Into a Budding Appetite for Biometrics

Wider availability of technology that would have been nearly unthinkable only a few years ago is making biometric authentication a more likely replacement for the password. In the latest development, Discover Financial Services on Thursday announced users of its mobile app who own an iPhone X can log in to …

Read More »

VeriFone Unloads Its Taxi Business, But Confronts a Challenging U.S. Market

VeriFone Systems Inc. has finally shed its underperforming taxi business, but it still faces a North American market hampered by a three-year delay in an EMV deadline for U.S. petroleum marketers. The San Jose, Calif.-based point-of-sale company sold the taxi unit on Tuesday for $30 million. VeriFone, which will retain …

Read More »

Bitcoin’s Fast Rise Has Investors Giddy But Obscures a New Solution for Network Growth

Bitcoin’s heady rise this year has pleased investors and drawn the attention of derivatives exchanges and other institutional players, but it may also have obscured a development going on behind the scenes to solve one of the digital currency’s biggest drawbacks: its weakness as a payment method. Bitcoin, which started …

Read More »

How Should a Global Network Be Governed? An Answer from AmEx’s Chenault Sparks Debate

Whether he intended to or not, Ken Chenault may well have touched off a debate about what constitutes the ideal governance structure for a global payments network. Chenault, who will retire early next year as chairman and chief executive of American Express Co., charged this week that his two big …

Read More »

Square Expands Its Bitcoin Beta to More Cash App Users While Bitcoin Pierces the $13K Level

Square Inc. late Tuesday said it is expanding its Bitcoin pilot as the cryptocurrency continues to climb, briefly breaching the $13,000 level early Wednesday. The pilot, which Square launched four weeks ago for what it said was a “small” number of Square Cash users, is now being made available to …

Read More »

With the Launch of Apple Pay Cash, Apple Stakes Its Claim in a Crowded P2P Business

Apple Inc. on Monday officially entered an increasingly crowded arena of players looking to carve out a share of the market for person-to-person payments. Apple Pay Cash, which the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant first announced six months ago, went live following the release of iOS 11.2, Apple’s latest operating-system update …

Read More »

PayPal Says Its TIO Probe Found Evidence of a Breach Affecting Potentially 1.6 Million Customers

PayPal Holdings Inc. and its TIO Networks unit are arranging free credit monitoring for consumers after finding evidence of a data breach at TIO that the companies say has potentially affected personally identifiable information for about 1.6 million customers of TIO’s bill-pay service. The unauthorized access could have compromised data …

Read More »

With a Green Light From the CFTC, Three Trading Houses Get Set for Bitcoin Futures

CME Group Inc. said on Friday it will launch a futures contract for Bitcoin on Dec. 18, a move some expect will lend considerable stability to the market for the 8-year-old digital currency. Also on Friday, Chicago-based CME’s crosstown rival, Cboe Global Markets Inc., said it will announce “shortly” an …

Read More »

PayPal Restores Some TIO Service But Big Questions Linger Over TIO’s Security Issues

PayPal Holdings Inc. has restored some service in its TIO Networks bill-pay operation but pressing questions remain about the security vulnerability that spurred PayPal to shut down the service and about how TIO’s problems will affect PayPal chief executive Dan Schulman’s strategy to serve the underbanked population. The incident also …

Read More »
Digital Transactions