It’s back-to-school time, and that means it’s also time for college-age students and their parents to pay tuition charges. Most of the largest private, public, and community colleges accept credit cards for these charges, but a growing majority of these institutions also assess hefty so-called convenience fees to cardholders, according …
Read More »Eye on Mobile Payments: Chase Pay Snags Phillips 66; Report Decries Wallets’ Value Void
JPMorgan Chase Co.’s Chase Pay mobile wallet, probably the most ambitious bank-operated U.S. mobile-payments service, on Wednesday announced it has signed up Phillips 66 Co., which sells gasoline under the Phillips 66, Conoco, and 76 brands, and will accept Chase Pay at its pumps and in its stores. No date …
Read More »A New Mobile Wallet from Pharmacy Giant CVS Shows Further Migration From MCX
Slowly but surely, the big merchants that make up the stalled Merchant Customer Exchange LLC retailer consortium are finding their own way in mobile payments. The latest example is MCX stalwart CVS Health Corp., which on Thursday announced the launch of its CVS Pay mobile wallet. The Woonsocket, R.I.-based chain …
Read More »MasterCard’s Banga Parries Queries About Staged-Wallet Fee in Wake of Visa-PayPal Deal
The shock waves generated by Visa Inc.’s new deal with PayPal Holdings Inc. reached MasterCard Inc. on Thursday, with chief executive Ajay Banga hailing the agreement while parrying questions from analysts about its possible effect on a fee MasterCard imposed in 2013 to deal with PayPal and other digital wallets that rely on …
Read More »Apple’s Boss Sums up Apple Pay: ‘Astronomical’ Growth, But on a ‘Very Small’ Base
Apple Inc. is notoriously tightlipped about how its Apple Pay mobile-payments service is doing, and the occasion of the computing giant’s quarterly earnings call late Tuesday was no exception. Still, while Apple chief executive Tim Cook said little to satisfy widespread curiosity about the wallet’s adoption and usage among consumers, …
Read More »With Checkbook, a Payments Veteran Creates a Souped-Up Engine for Check 21 Clearing
The United States remains one of the world’s last bastions of the paper check, a situation a startup called Checkbook Inc. sees as a massive opportunity. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has been working for the last two years on a system that it says allows businesses and individuals to use …
Read More »Visa’s Scharf Feels No Love for the ACH, But Is His Sentiment Based on the Facts?
Visa Inc.’s disdain for the automated clearing house as a competing payments network has been a given for years, but never did it come into focus more than it did last week when the giant card network announced its wide-ranging agreement with PayPal Holdings Inc. The deal smoothed over a …
Read More »In the Face of the National ‘Pays,’ Some Small Institutions Hedge Their Bets
Few observers are surprised big banks like Capital One Financial Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. are getting into the mobile-wallet market, but what about smaller financial institutions like credit unions and community banks? While some might figure the small players will fall into the arms …
Read More »A Sweeping Deal With Visa Allows PayPal To Make Another Run at the Physical POS
For years, PayPal Holdings Inc. has struggled to bring its popular online payment product to the physical point of sale, and now a deal announced Thursday with Visa Inc. may help the company finally realize that ambition. The sweeping, multiyear agreement could also represent a thaw in what have often …
Read More »Telcos Fade Even Further From the Mobile-Wallet Scene With the Collapse of Suretap
The failure of Suretap Wallet L.P., the Canadian mobile-payments service controlled by five telecommunications companies, raises further questions about the role, if any, telcos will play in this business, experts tell Digital Transactions News. Suretap, which announced Friday it will shut down effective Aug. 26 after barely more than a …
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