Sunday , December 15, 2024

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.

Ultra-Low Conversion Rates for Online And Mobile Commerce Evoke Some Suggestions

With more and more consumers getting accustomed to shopping online and on mobile devices, merchants are losing more and more sales to checkout abandonment. “Conversion rates aren’t where we’d like to see them,” said Joe Walent, a senior analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, a payments consultancy. Walent, who spoke Tuesday …

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Contactless in the U.K. Reaches 1 Billion Transactions, Tripling the Nation’s 2014 Volume

Confronted with pokey EMV transactions, consumers and merchants in the United States may be eagerly looking for the contactless revolution to start. But in the United Kingdom, the wave-and-pay method is already picking up quite a head of steam. Consumers in the U.K. performed just over 1 billion contactless transactions …

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Android Pay Cardless ATM Transactions Coming to BofA; PayPal Sets Big Goals

Cardless ATM technology that enables consumers to make cash withdrawals is now available via Android Pay at select Bank of America Corp. locations, the banking giant announced Wednesday at Google’s annual IO conference. BofA says the service has initially been available at some ATMs in Boston, Charlotte, N.C., New York …

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While Funding Cools for Payments Generally, Bitcoin And Blockchain Reap a Rich Harvest

Venture funding for payments companies may have slowed dramatically in recent months, but that’s not the case across the board. Bitcoin and blockchain startups in particular uncorked a geyser of cash in the first quarter, with dollars invested totaling $173 million on 39 deals, according to data released this week …

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Dallas’s Rapid Transit System Looks To Move Cash Payments to Local Retailers

More than 80% of the fare value collected by the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System at its ticket windows and on its buses comes in the form of cash, so next spring the transit agency will start offloading that cash onto local 7-Elevens and other stores. DART and PayNearMe Inc., …

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After Eight Months of Testing, MCX Postpones CurrentC Rollout, Lays off 30 Staffers

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

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Payments Network Bogeyman Durbin Unleashes Double-Barreled Inquiry Into EMV

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., made his name in the payments business with an amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that put a cap on the debit card interchange big banks can earn. Now, he’s investigating the nation’s rocky EMV rollout with separate inquiries concerning snarled certification queues and the …

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Wendy’s Goes Public With Data Breach, And Cautions About Current And Possible Suits

The Wendy’s Co. admitted publicly Wednesday that a point-of-sale system at “fewer than 300” of its franchised restaurants in North America had been affected by malware, starting last fall. In a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Dublin, Ohio-based hamburger chain also said it has worked with …

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They May Account for a Sliver of Acquiring, But ISVs And VARs Are Poised for Fast Growth

For all the talk about independent software vendors and value-added resellers as an alternative channel for acquirers to sign up new merchants, the ISV/VAR share of the market is actually quite small, according to research released last week by Annapolis, Md.-based First Annapolis Consulting. The research does indicate, however, that …

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Consolidation Heats up in Carrier Billing With Bango’s $3.5 Million Deal for BilltoMobile

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

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