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 …
Read More »Facing an Array of Wallet Rivals, MasterCard Launches a Revamped Masterpass Service
MasterCard Inc. on Thursday rolled out a revamped Masterpass digital wallet it clearly hopes will out-compete offerings from technology titans like Alphabet Inc., Apple Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., all of which have come into the market since Masterpass’s capability the original wallet had at its launch, though it …
Read More »Bitcoin’s ‘Halving’ Poses a Threat to Miners, But It’s One That Could Resolve Itself
Bitcoin watchers held their breath over the weekend when the celebrated “halving” took place, abruptly chopping in half the incentive those who produce Bitcoin receive and raising questions about the impact the event would have on the 7-year-old cryptocurrency. The halving, which is part of Bitcoin’s basic code and so …
Read More »In Acquiring, a Slow Pace of Change Masks Rapid Run-up in Growth for Newer Models
The acquiring business is accustomed to a slow rate of change, but that deliberate pace is masking radical underlying shifts in how merchants handle payments and whom they deal with for processing services, according to research at First Annapolis Consulting, Annapolis, Md. Change comes so slowly in this business that …
Read More »Breach Epidemic May Fuel Fraud, But It’s Also Driving a Search for Password Alternatives
The password is one of the oldest authentication tools known to man, and now it is rapidly becoming the least respected among security experts for use online or in-app. Consumers’ use of easily guessed codes, coupled with a recent barrage of data breaches, has these experts predicting passwords will fade …
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