The buy now, pay later trend has lifted a wide range of companies specializing in these online and point-of-sale installment-payment products, not least Affirm Holdings Inc. But late on Wednesday the 11-year-old company reported subpar results for its December quarter and announced it is dismissing 19% of its workforce. The …
Read More »The Potential to Choose Foreign Networks Worries Backers of Credit Card Choice
A bill designed to allow merchants to have a choice of networks for routing credit card transactions failed to pass last year, but now international tensions could affect the proposed law’s prospects in the new Congress. The bill, called the Credit Card Competition Act, would mandate that merchants have a …
Read More »Blockchain on a Mobile App? AmazeWallet Says It’s Coming Soon
A company called AmazeWallet over the weekend said it will soon launch a so-called super app that will let users run blockchain technology on a mobile phone. The app will run such functions as mining tokens, exchanging cryptocurrency, and sending encrypted messages, the London-based company noted. AmazeWallet said it has …
Read More »Sightline Brands Its Proprietary Gaming Card With Visa
With sports betting and casino gambling steadily gaining prominence as a payments market, payment processors are increasingly jumping on the opportunities the market presents. In the latest development, gaming-payments specialist Sightline Payments said it will offer its Play+ card, which has attracted 1.5 million users so far, as a Visa-branded …
Read More »Malware Emerges to Force Contactless Users to Insert Their Card Instead
Contactless payments have taken off in the United States and other markets in recent years, but now a piece of malware has emerged that can block wave-and-pay or tap-to-pay transactions and force users to insert their cards in a terminal instead, according to a new report by the Moscow-based global …
Read More »The CFPB Proposes a Dramatic Cut in Fees for Credit Card Late Payments
Observers have warned that an activist Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is likely to act on multiple fronts that involve the payments industry. Early Wednesday it released its latest proposal, a move to cut the $12 billion it estimates consumers pay annually in credit card late fees. While the proposal could …
Read More »Musk Is Engineering a Return to Payments Via Twitter, Reports Say
Elon Musk helped found what became PayPal back at the turn of the century, and now it appears he is moving on an ambition he outlined months ago to add a payments feature to Twitter, the social-media platform he paid $44 billion to acquire in October. The San Francisco-based company …
Read More »AmEx Posts a Double-Digit Rise in ’22 Volume But Faces Queries About Its Card Take
American Express Co., whose travel-and-entertainment focus took a beating during the pandemic and is now rebounding, reported strong growth early Friday for its latest quarter, but left at least some equity analysts questioning whether the growth is strong enough. Analysts zeroed in on revenue growth and card-acquisition rates, in particular, …
Read More »Mastercard Celebrates Pay by Bank And Its ‘Multi-Rail Strategy’ As It Records Its ’22 Results
Mastercard Inc. has made some big news in recent months, but you wouldn’t know all of it from the company’s conference call early Thursday to discuss its fourth-quarter 2022 and full-year results. Mastercard celebrated recently concluded major deals that make the global payments company the exclusive provider of debit branding …
Read More »Eye on Money Transfer: MoneyGram Harnesses a Messaging App; Grupo Coppel’s U.S. App
Money-transfer firms are looking for new ways to leverage their extensive international networks, with the latest development emerging early Wednesday as MoneyGram international Inc. announced it is opening its system to BOTIM, a voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) provider with 90 million users in the Middle East and Africa. The deal, which …
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