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 …
Read More »To Be Competitive, Banks May Need a Mobile Wallet That Leverages Their Retail Banking Prowess
If banks are to compete against the likes of Apple Pay and Google Wallet in the mobile-wallet arena, they are going to have to provide value-added features that leverage their retail-banking products, such as money management and loyalty accrual and redemption. “The killer question is how to disrupt something that …
Read More »Working With Early Warning, Big Banks Eye a New Digital Wallet
A major venture by some of the country’s biggest banks to launch a digital wallet using a platform from Early Warning Services LLC, news of which emerged early Monday, is likely to benefit from the banks’ technology resources. But it could be hindered by consumers’ entrenched preferences for major-brand wallets …
Read More »The U.S. Should Exert CBDC Leadership And Invest More in a U.S. Version, a Digital Dollar Group Says
The Digital Dollar Project early Wednesday issued recommendations that include bigger investments by the federal government in researching a tokenized digital dollar. The group also called on the United States to exert leadership internationally in setting global standards for government-issued digital currencies even if the U.S. itself ultimately refrains from …
Read More »ACI Launches Its Instant Pay in the U.S. And Wallet Acceptance Internationally
ACI Worldwide Inc. early Tuesday announced it is offering a real-time payments service to U.S. merchants and launched a platform to ease acceptance of digital wallets for merchants in more than 70 countries. ACI Instant Pay is aimed at easing acceptance of online and mobile transactions, as well as payments …
Read More »MagicCube Strikes Deals With Mobile Device Makers And Joins the PCI Council
For several years, MagicCube Inc. has worked to prove that merchants can safely and speedily accept card payments with no hardware other than an off-the-shelf mobile device. Now the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has added a new wrinkle to its strategy: agreements with device vendors that make MagicCube’s iAccept the …
Read More »How Netevia Seeks to Be ‘a Square for ISOs’
Payments platforms have worked for years to find the key to winning and keeping merchants while also holding on to independent sales organizations, the agents that are key to signing up merchants. Now Netevia Group LLC thinks it’s found that key in banking. “It’s a pretty simple strategy,” says Vlad …
Read More »Processor Consolidation Takes a Big Step With Nuvei’s $1.3 Billion Bid for Paya
Nine days into 2023, the ongoing wave of processor consolidation rolled further with the announcement early Monday that Nuvei Corp. has agreed to acquire Atlanta-based processor Paya Holdings Inc. in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. The transaction would bring to Montreal-based Nuvei a processor with deep roots in payments …
Read More »Why the FTC Isolated Mastercard With Its Pre-Christmas Consent Order
When the Federal Trade Commission announced two days before Christmas it had leveled a preliminary consent order against Mastercard Inc. to correct what the agency saw as roadblocks the card company had erected against routing online debit transactions to competing networks, the move may have surprised at least some observers. …
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