With more than half a million electric cars on the road, businesses are looking at ways to boost the network of charging stations across the country and make it easier to pay for the increasing flow of electricity. Now a partnership announced Tuesday plans to put blockchain to work on …
Read More »With Breaches, Companies Find They Have Met the Enemy, And He Is Us
When fraudsters launch a cyber attack, they may not be their target’s worst enemy. Equally troublesome could be the business’s own staff, according to results of a survey of 5,000 companies around the world released Monday by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based global cybersecurity firm. It turns out employees not only …
Read More »Backed by NACHA, a New Payments Group Works Toward Standardized APIs
There’s nothing new about application programming interfaces. The code has been around for years, streamlining payments flows between otherwise unrelated apps. Recently, APIs have made possible the seamless integrations that mobile-payments users now take for granted. But now a group of payments executives are starting to worry that proprietary API …
Read More »Aiming for Global Scale, Vantiv Agrees to Buy Worldpay for $9.9 Billion
In a play for scale in a rapidly expanding e-commerce market, Vantiv Inc. on Wednesday agreed to buy the United Kingdom-based processor Worldpay Group plc for approximately $9.9 billion. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which had also expressed interest in Worldpay, has withdrawn from the bidding. The boards of the two …
Read More »Mobile-Wallet Payments Topped 1 Billion by End of 2015, Latest Fed Data Show
Mobile-wallet transactions in the United States grew 333% from 2012 through 2015, albeit on a relatively small base, according to data released Friday by the Federal Reserve. Wallets generated 1.3 billion payments in 2015, the Fed data show, versus 300 million transactions three years earlier. That robust rate of growth …
Read More »Mobile-Accepting Merchants Register Mixed Results in Risk Detection, Survey Reports
With much of the payments business focused on mobile payments, merchants are making progress in dealing with the payment method but are still lagging in key areas, such as the ability to identify overseas transactions, according to survey results released Thursday. Risk-detection, in particular, is an area where results are …
Read More »The World’s Two Biggest Digital Currencies Wrestle With Volatility, Capacity Issues
The two biggest cryptocurrencies are experiencing growing pains that could change their character and decide their fundamental purpose in the years to come. Bitcoin, the largest digital currency at a market capitalization of $42.6 billion as of Wednesday mid-morning, remains a volatile investment at the same time its users contend …
Read More »Rebounding From 2016’s Fourth Quarter, the ACH Racks up a Robust 6.9% Growth Rate
As the nation’s automated clearing house network introduces faster payments, it’s also racking up steady increases in transaction volume. The system processed approximately 5.35 billion payments in the first quarter, notching nearly 7% growth over the first quarter of last year and rebounding smartly from a tepid 3.7% growth rate …
Read More »Durbin Repeal Effort Could Be Complicated by Nuanced Position of Some Small Banks
In the wake of a failed effort to repeal the Durbin Amendment this spring, many banks, networks, lobbying groups, and other repeal advocates are vowing to try again, as are the Congressmen who pushed the original repeal effort. But that doesn’t mean smaller banks, at least, are totally united behind …
Read More »Mastercard Takes Aim at Small-Business Payments in a Venture With AvidXchange
Payment card networks have for years eyed the broad market for small-business payments, which are still largely executed with paper checks. On Thursday, Mastercard Inc. and payables-automation company AvidXchange Inc. said they will attack that paper mountain with The Mastercard B2B Hub, which will be distributed to small- and mid-size …
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