Saturday , January 25, 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.

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 …

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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 JPMorgan Chase & Co., which had also expressed interest in Worldpay, has withdrawn from the bidding.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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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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