Adoption and usage rates for the mobile wallets from Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. (Google), and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have been far from stellar, but now evidence is emerging that Apple’s decision a year ago to ditch fingerprint identification on its newest smart phones in favor of facial-recognition technology could …
Read More »Behavioral Solutions Arrive to Fight a Fast-Rising Plague of Account-Takeover Losses
With massive data breaches hitting the headlines and account-takeover fraud booming, payments players are scrambling for solutions. One possibility is so-called behavioral biometrics, a science that tries to detect imposters’ fraudulent activity in real time by comparing their online behavior with the known patterns of a genuine user. The latest …
Read More »Mobile Biller Boku Picks up ID Technology With a $68 Million Deal for Danal
Bill-to-mobile is often sidelined in discussions about mobile payments, but Boku Inc. brought the technique to center stage this week with a deal to acquire San Jose, Calif.-based Danal Inc. Boku’s shares, which trade on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market, fell in the wake of the announcement, with …
Read More »With a Strong Mobile Lift, Virtual Cards Are Close to Dominating B2B Card Payments
In a vast and rapidly growing commercial card market, virtual cards are grabbing dollar-volume share and are poised to dominate business-to-business card payments, according to research from Accenture Payments. Corporate cards, purchasing cards, and virtual cards will account for $523 billion in U.S. commercial card volume, up 10% from 2017, …
Read More »Consumers Have No Reservations About Using P2P Payments To Give Cash During the Holidays
The surge in popularity for peer-to-peer payments is making itself felt in the realm of holiday gifting, helping to erode a longstanding cultural taboo against giving cash during the annual gift-giving season. Gift transactions rose 47.2% in December 2017 over the monthly average for the previous August through October, according …
Read More »Can Amazon Pay Win in Stores? It May Depend on Processing Costs And the Right Incentives
Amazon.com Inc.’s strategy to push its Amazon Pay wallet into physical stores could depend crucially on its ability to cut payment-processing costs and generate marketing advantages for merchants, including Groupon-like incentives, experts tell Digital Transactions News. The new strategy has been in the works at least since 2017 but reached …
Read More »Bitcoin’s Renewed Volatility Casts a Spotlight on Its Shrinking Merchant Volume
Bitcoin’s return to volatility in recent days isn’t the only issue the digital currency confronts as it seeks to establish a toehold in the world of payments. As it turns out, its use in actual payment transactions is shrinking fast, according to numbers compiled by Chainalysis Inc., a New York …
Read More »A Fraud Spike at Venmo Vexed PayPal Just As the Company Sought Venmo Revenue
PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …
Read More »Not All Financial Institutions Are on Board the Mobile-Banking Train
Payments experts may think mobile technology is crucial for banks and other financial-service providers, but it turns out a significant chunk of financial institutions don’t agree. Fourteen percent of respondents in a survey this summer of banks and credit unions said they not only don’t offer mobile payments and other …
Read More »With Chinese Tourism Rising, 7-Eleven Starts Accepting Alipay And WeChat Pay in Canada
As Chinese tourists pour into the United States and Canada, merchants are preparing for them by outfitting their checkouts to accept WeChat Pay and Alipay, the two leading Chinese mobile-payments services. The latest is 7-Eleven Inc., which said Tuesday it is enabling acceptance of the two wallets at 35 stores …
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