Open-loop financial-services prepaid cards will be one of the fastest-growing segments for prepaid over the next two years, forecasts the “12th Annual U.S. Prepaid Cards Market Forecasts, 2015-2018,” recently released by Mercator Advisory Group Inc. The report, which gauges the growth potential of both open-loop and closed-loop prepaid cards, also …

As 2016 beckons, multiple challenges and opportunities await the payments industry and the Electronic Transactions Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group that represents the merchant-acquiring and -processing industry. Incoming ETA board president Greg Cohen says the association, and the payments industry it represents, are in the midst of a transformation …

Efforts to get EMV chip cards into the wallets of U.S. consumers may be paying off. Some 52% of cards presented to merchants in the weeks following the Oct. 1 liability shift bear a chip, says CardFlight Inc., a mobile point-of-sale provider, in the debut of its EMV Migration Tracker. …

  Publicly-held merchant acquirers were the best-performing payments stocks of 2015, investment-advisory firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods says in its “2016 Outlook: Pay for Growth in This Environment” report released Tuesday. Among the acquirers and processors KBW tracks are PayPal Holdings Inc., Global Payments Inc., Vantiv Inc., Heartland Payment Systems …

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee on Tuesday afternoon was scheduled to consider a data-security bill that is drawing fire from merchant trade groups and consumer advocates, but which has the support of the American Bankers Association. H.R. 2205, the Data Security Act of 2015, was introduced last …

Changes in consumer shopping behavior and new ways for companies to measure how they deliver a service are providing a boost in subscription billing, especially as cloud-based services become more mainstream. “The size of the subscription-billing service market is exploding with the advent of cloud-billing solutions being offered as a …

Consumer shopping during the Thanksgiving-holiday weekend increased 9.4%, almost tripling the growth rate last year, according to card-transaction data released by First Data Corp. In 2014, the holiday-shopping weekend grew by 3.5% over 2013. The Atlanta-based processor analyzed the volume of transactions made at more than 820,000 merchant locations that …

Just like law-abiding consumers, criminals hope to score good deals during the holiday shopping season. And luxury items and business services, such as hosting plans and search engine optimization, top their lists, finds an analysis by Forter, a San Francisco-based fraud-prevention specialist. In a report released on Monday, Forter analyzed …

Holiday shoppers took advantage of online deals on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, ringing up $2.8 billion in sales for retailers, according to research firm comScore Inc. Online sales on Thanksgiving topped $1.1 billion, a 9% increase from $1 billion in 2014. Black Friday sales of $1.7 …

Retailers and restaurants have a higher degree of awareness about EMV and its accompanying liability shift than other merchant types, finds the Paychex Small Business Survey, released Tuesday. In the survey of more than 760 small-business owners between Oct. 14 and Oct. 27, 69% of those in retail and restaurants …