American Express Co. saw its crucial travel-and-entertainment business continue to recover in the final three months of 2021, leading top company executives Tuesday morning to express considerable optimism for 2022. But don’t look any time soon for the New York City-based card giant to make any major forays into buy …
Read More »A Digital Dollar Backer Applauds the Fed But Stresses a Need for Privacy Protections
The Federal Reserve’s release last week of a discussion paper exploring a central bank digital currency for the United States has evoked interest from a group that emerged two years ago to help launch just such an initiative. The Digital Dollar Project on Friday applauded the Fed’s effort and underscored …
Read More »The Fed’s Paper on a U.S. Digital Currency Offers Few Signs of How the Regulator Is Leaning
The Federal Reserve Board released a paper Thursday afternoon on the question of a central bank digital currency for the United States, and even though the Fed would play a crucial role in any such venture, observers looking for hints on how the central bank is leaning on the issue …
Read More »The ACH Posts a Big Quarterly Gain As Same-Day, B2B, And Health-Care Payments Soar
The nation’s automated clearing house network handled 7.5 billion transactions in the fourth quarter of 2021, up 6.1% over the same period in 2020, Nacha reported Thursday. The growth was driven largely by gains in health-care and business-to-business payments, as well as robust increases in same-day ACH, the network’s faster-payments …
Read More »Amazon’s Acceptance Ban Got Visa’s Attention in the U.K. Now What Will Negotiations Likely Yield?
Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to pull back from its threat to stop accepting Visa cards issued in the United Kingdom may have evoked a sigh of relief among some consumers, not to mention at Visa itself, but it also could betoken some complex dynamics behind the decision-making at both corporate giants. …
Read More »Trends Like Open Banking And BNPL Will Sustain E-Commerce’s Hot Streak, a Report Says
Open banking, single-click checkout wallets, and the hot buy now, pay later trend will all help drive e-commerce volume worldwide in the coming five years, predicts Juniper Research in a report released Monday. This momentum is likely to push online sales long after the short-term impetus from the pandemic subsides, …
Read More »Venmo Adds a Gift-Wrap Feature for Users Sending Money on Special Occasions
Peer-to-peer money transfers have become a hyper-competitive market, driving even the best-known providers to seek out an edge. One such idea is to introduce a feature that lets senders add virtual gift-wrapping to payments they’re sending for special occasions, and on Thursday Venmo started rolling out just such a feature. …
Read More »CBDCs Inch Closer to Wider Acceptance as the Global Card Networks Build Alliances
It was probably only a matter of time before the two global card networks, which have already made overtures to blockchain technology, began venturing into support for central bank digital currencies. News of the latest development emerged very early Thursday with an announcement from Visa Inc. and blockchain software developer …
Read More »Eye on Crypto: BBTV Offers Crypto ‘at Scale’ to Content Creators; a Nuvei Paper Sizes up Crypto
One of the most receptive markets for cryptocurrency could be that for content creators, most of whom are self-employed and looking for fast and reliable ways to get paid. That’s what BBTV Holdings Inc. figures, and on Wednesday the video platform launched Pay to Crypto to send payments to marketers on …
Read More »Cash Still Looms Large for Merchants. Brink’s Is Signing Processors to Tackle the Issue
Lost in much of the conversation about digital payments, particularly since the onset of the pandemic, is what to do about the cash merchants take in. The Brink’s Co., which has been hauling and securing cash since 1859, says it has an answer, and on Tuesday it announced it also …
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