Friday , December 13, 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.

Mid-Market Specialists in Small And Medium Merchants Report Quarterly Gains

Mid-size payments processors have contended with a pandemic, a sharply rising cost of funds, and pronounced inflation over the past few years, but that hasn’t stopped them from capturing volume, particularly from the small and medium-size merchants that have long been their specialty. In results reported early Thursday, Alpharetta, Ga.-based …

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PayPal Makes Unbranded Checkout a ‘Strategic Imperative’ As Its CEO Prepares to Retire

PayPal has been known for some time as a major alternative for checkout online, but now the company is making it plain it’s putting considerable resources behind checkouts where its services function entirely in the background. So-called unbranded checkout, led by the company’s Braintree processing platform along with a relatively …

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Merchants’ Cost Burden for Card Acceptance Has Long Been Flat, a Card Industry Group Argues

Merchants’ price for accepting credit cards has remained steady for years, according to data released Monday by the Electronic Payments Coalition, an advocacy group representing the payment card industry. The EPC’s release comes as widespread and longstanding merchant complaints about the cost of card acceptance have sparked efforts by federal …

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Shift4 Busies Itself with Domestic Expansion As It Waits for Clearance on Its Finaro Deal

Shift4 Payments Inc. is still waiting on approval from European regulators to complete its $525-million Finaro acquisition, but in the mean time the Allentown, Pa.-based processor has been busy expanding in its home market. That expansion includes yet other acquisitions aimed at consolidating Shift4’s grip on the restaurant point-of-sale market, …

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GoDaddy Joins With Microsoft to Enable Payments During Meetings on Teams

Businesses were quick to adopt online chat platforms as a handy meeting tool during the pandemic, and now payments providers are starting to target the services as a new venue for transactions. One of the first is GoDaddy Inc., which on Monday announced it is working with Microsoft Corp. to …

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Global Payments Looks for Big Results From EVO As Long-Time CEO Sloan Prepares to Leave

The big processor Global Payments Inc. on Monday morning announced upbeat first-quarter results but also said its chief executive, Jeff Sloan, is departing after nine years in the role. Sloan, who will leave Global Payments June 1 and will be succeeded by long-time president and chief operating officer Cameron Bready, …

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How Tighter Money And Longer Diligence Have Slowed a Once ‘Frothy’ M&A Market

A sort of disequilibrium has set in in payments mergers and acquisitions, leading to fewer deals and stretched out times to conclude the deals that do close, according to M&A experts who spoke this week at the Electronic Transactions Association’s Transact conference in Atlanta. The new dispensation contrasts sharply with …

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‘We’re Well-Positioned’ for FedNow, Says Mastercard’s CEO

The impending arrival of a commercial real-time payments service from no less an entity than the Federal Reserve will be a major event, but one Mastercard Inc.’s top brass says the card company will take in stride. “We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out, we’re well-positioned,” Michael …

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As FedNow Gears up for Its July Launch, Specific Applications Beckon, Including Payroll

The official launch of FedNow as a commercial service is set for July, but already the nation’s banking regulator, along with observers, have seen a pattern in where initial participants have been using the real-time payments service. “We’re starting to see more activity around business-to-consumer [payments], related to payroll front …

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The ACH And Debit Top the Growth Charts, According to the Latest Fed Study

Payments analysts looking for where the growth is can find it in the automated clearing house network and in debit cards. With respect to transaction volume, no U.S. payment system grew faster over the three years from 2018 to 2021 than the ACH, which posted a compound annual growth rate …

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