More than a year after the Covid-19 pandemic hit, igniting fears that the virus could be spread by handling currency, a group of three financial associations and a Chicago-based cash-in-transit and money-protection service sent a letter Monday to members of Congress, governors, and state legislators around the country warning about the …

While account takeover is a major concern for financial institutions and merchants, many underestimate the cost as well as the frequency of attacks, says a report released Thursday by Arkose Labs, a San Francisco-based provider of fraud-prevention technology. Indeed, one of the costliest aspects of account takeovers is the loss of …

Just over a year after transaction volume in many merchant segments flatlined due to the economic turmoil caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, activity is showing a steadily strengthening pulse, according to data released Thursday by Shift4 Payments Inc. In March, Shift4’s end-to-end transaction volume totaled $3.3 billion, up 40% from …

In 2020, 74% of organizations were targets of payments fraud, down from 81% in 2019 and 82% 2018, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ annual fraud report. The Bethesda, Md.-based association has surveyed companies across myriad industries yearly for 17 years. Large organizations, those with annual revenue of $1 …

As part of its strategy to enable faster electronic payments, Dwolla Inc. on Tuesday released an application programming interface to enable real-time payments through The Clearing House Payments Co.’s RTP network. Fort Lee, New Jersey-based Cross River Bank Inc. will provide the processing link to the RTP network. Development of …

With its acquisition of Axia Technologies Inc., also known as AxiaMed, Bank of America Corp. took a big step toward rebuilding its merchant-acquiring business. AxiaMed provides financial services and payments technology to health-care providers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition, announced Friday, gives Bank of America a …

OLB Group is the latest processor to support Quick Response codes as merchants look for ways to adopt contactless-payment options in the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. OLB will support dynamic QR codes, which are generated in real time for each transaction, on its cloud-based OmniSoft business-management platform and …

The drive to build merchant acceptance of cryptocurrency continues to gain momentum with RocketFuel Blockchain Inc.’s announcement on Wednesday that it is rolling out a one-click, blockchain-based payments solution for e-commerce transactions. RocketFuel’s service supports payments or direct bank transfers in 43 cryptocurrencies. The first two merchants to adopt the …

Continuing its push to make cryptocurrency a mainstream payment option, PayPal Holdings, Inc. on Monday announced that it will accept cryptocurrency at checkout.  The move builds on PayPal’s strategy of increasing the utility of cryptocurrency so it can become a mainstream payment option. PayPal took the first step in that …

Seeking to reduce merchant-account fraud, also known as merchant bust-out fraud, and provide merchants with a way to authenticate consumers, payments-technology provider On The Fly POS is adding Ipsidy Inc.’s Identity as a Service (IDaaS) biometric identity-verification technology to its platform. Ipsidy’s app validates a merchant’s identity by comparing a …