Tablet-based point-of-sale company Revel Systems says it has secured $90 million in Series C financing, a windfall it will use to keep up with growth for its iPad-based POS systems, the company announced Tuesday. Private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which has long invested in payments companies, …
Read More »Launched in May, Square Capital Has Advanced $75 Million to 15,000 Square Sellers
Square Inc.’s 6-month-old cash-advance product, Square Capital, has distributed $75 million to some 15,000 small businesses, the San Francisco-based payments company announced via Twitter this week. Further, merchants that have accepted the advances have processed in excess of $1 billion in sales through Square, the company said. It also pointed …
Read More »Report: Booming E-Commerce Will Make CNP Fraud Soar, Not Conversion to EMV
With a critical deadline coming up in less than a year, it has become a common observation about the U.S. conversion to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard that transaction fraud prevented by EMV will simply move into e-commerce channels. Now, a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research argues …
Read More »Shipping Costs Deter Online Buyers the Most, While Social Nets, Apps, Not Big Factors
Surprise shipping costs are the leading cause of shopping-cart abandonment. Meanwhile, shopping apps are popular, but not used as much as you might think. And while social networks have grown in popularity every year, they have a surprisingly small influence on e-commerce buying decisions. n Asked what factors cause them …
Read More »Giant Eagle Reverses Spiraling Transaction Costs With Durbin-Assisted Rate Arbitrage
The Durbin Amendment may be best known for its stringent ceiling on debit card interchange, but merchants are discovering that another part of the law that requires transaction-routing choices can be just as effective as rate caps in controlling processing costs. Giant Eagle Inc., a Pittsburgh-based supermarket chain operating nearly …
Read More »With October 2015 11 Months Away, POS Terminal Exec Doubts Mass Merchant EMV Adoption
Just because merchants have until next October to install terminals capable of processing chip cards and avoid shouldering liability for counterfeit card transactions doesn’t mean most of them will have done so by that date. Many experts, and a number of merchants themselves, have made that point. But major terminal …
Read More »MCX Chief Davidson Strikes Defiant Tone While Touting Benefits of CurrentC’s Wallet
By John Stewart Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX) has launched its CurrentC mobile-payment service with “thousands” of consumers in “several American cities,” the program’s chief executive said on Wednesday. The “consumers,” employees of retailers that make up the Needham, Mass.-based MCX consortium, are part of a pilot for the fledgling …
Read More »Online Lending Platforms Ramp up to Fill Small-Merchant Void Left by Banks
With financial institutions lending less to small businesses, new, technology-based companies are moving into merchant lending to fill the void. This is a market typically served by so-called merchant cash-advance firms, companies that lend money in the form of advances against a merchant’s expected credit card volume. In many cases, …
Read More »Tech Firms See Opportunity As Remote Capture Leads to Rising Problem of Bad Check Images
For the past decade, image exchange has been one of the undisputed success stories of electronic payments—so much so, in fact, that nearly all banking and retail executives take it for granted that paper checks will clear as images and funds will likely settle the same or next day. But …
Read More »Issuers’ Apple Pay Pact Assigns Remarkable Authority to Card Networks As Well As Apple
Issuers signing up to have their cards included in the Apple Pay wallet may benefit from all the hype Apple Inc. is generating for the new mobile-payment service. But behind the scenes, the 500 or so financial institutions that have enlisted in the program so far are also signing up …
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