Lightspeed Commerce Inc. early Thursday announced the launch of Lightspeed Retail. The new platform, which pulls features from platforms of other companies the Montreal-based processor has acquired, combines point-of-sale, payments, and e-commerce solutions.  The platform also leverages so-called headless commerce technology, which is an e-commerce architecture where front-end applications are decoupled …

The big payments fintech Stripe Inc. extended its reach into the world of open banking late on Wednesday with the launch of Stripe Financial Connections, an application that allows businesses to establish direct connections with their customers’ bank accounts. The new application will enable businesses to verify accounts for payments …

To effectively service markets where speed of payment is critical, such as online gaming and cryptocurrency, Paysafe Ltd. announced Tuesday it is integrating Visa Direct in its platform. Paysafe will offer Visa Direct, Visa Inc.’s real-time push-payment network, to merchants, exchanges, operators, and other online businesses in the United Kingdom …

In preparation for the launch of its FedNow instant payments program in 2023, the Federal Reserve announced Monday it has begun the testing phase for the program, including the onboarding of participating organizations. More than 120 organizations, including Square Financial Services Inc., an industrial-bank subsidiary of Block Inc., and Q2 …

Electronic payments options for legal cannabis sales broadened their reach with Thursday’s deal between Aeropay, a digital payments provider specializing in cannabis sales, and Flowhub, a point-of-sale platform for legal cannabis dispensaries. The deal will enable more than 1,000 dispensaries using Flowhub’s POS software to accept ACH payments. To initiate …

Thanks to more businesses implementing fraud-prevention tools, global digital fraud decreased more than 22% during the first quarter of 2022, compared to the same period a year earlier, according to TransUnion LLC’s quarterly digital-fraud analysis, released Thursday.  On a per-category basis, financial services, telecommunications, and retail all saw declines in …

As the mass exodus of Ukrainian refugees fleeing their war-torn country continues, charitable organizations and businesses are finding new ways to provide support. Cryptocurrency exchange and blockchain-infrastructure provider Binance joined those efforts Tuesday, announcing the Binance Refugee Crypto Card. The Visa-branded debit card will allow displaced Ukrainians to make or …

With consumers—and criminals—flocking to e-commerce, card issuers and merchants are not only experiencing a significant increase in fraud, but also in so-called friendly fraud committed by cardholders who dispute legitimate purchases after the fact. As a result, merchants’ need for stronger cardholder verification tools is growing. To address that need, …

Taking cryptocurrency mainstream involves many tasks, among them eliminating as much as possible exceptions in transactions made with the virtual currency. In response to this need, BitPay Inc. said Thursday its accurate payment protocol has been adopted by cryptocurrency exchanges Bitso and Bitstamp and crypto wallets Edge and Guarda.  The …

To help its card-issuing clients keep pace with evolving risk-management and compliance issues, virtual-card issuing platform Marqeta Inc. on Thursday introduced RiskControl, a suite of risk-management, fraud-mitigation, and compliance tools it says are aimed at allowing issuers on its platform to get ahead of fraud and streamline their risk and …