Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Visa Inc. announced its Visa Checkout digital wallet now has more than 12 million consumer accounts and is offered by more than 675 financial institutions in 16 countries. “Hundreds of thousands” of merchants now use the platform, Visa said, making Checkout one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the company’s history. New merchants include Alaska Airlines, Chick-fil-A, Cole Haan, and Emirates and Wyndham Hotel Group.
• Breezeworks, a business-management platform for contractors, has integrated payment processing from mobile point-of-sale specialist Square Inc.
• Payments gateway and solutions vendor PayJunction unveiled its Smart Terminal, a cloud-based application programming interface linked to the Equinox Payments L5200 terminal. With this development, the companies claim they have “eliminated the lengthy and painstaking process of EMV Level 3 certification.” Besides EMV, the Smart Terminal also is capable of near-field communication, signature capture, and digital receipts, and is “free to qualified customers.”
• In a letter to Green Dot Corp. shareholders in support of management in the prepaid card provider’s proxy fight with dissident shareholder Harvest Capital Strategies, Green Dot board member Michael Moritz, the chairman of venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital, asked shareholders “to contemplate the message you want to send to every CEO and board that has stayed true to the long-term, and has the grit and resilience to turn around its business, as well as every founder and entrepreneur in America contemplating the prospect of running a public company.”
• Processor Payment Data Systems Inc. reported first-quarter revenues of $3.23 million, down 13.7% from $3.74 million a year earlier due to an 11% decrease in automated clearing house transactions and a 28% decline in returned-check transactions as well as customer attrition; the company posted a $32,002 loss versus net income of $708,617 in 2015’s first quarter. Credit card transactions increased 6%.
• TIO Networks Corp., which specializes in processing bill payments from self-serve kiosks, launched TIO.com, a portal that allows consumers to pay bills online to more than 9,000 billers. The launch represents the rebranding of the company’s Chargesmart.com site, which it acquired from VeriFone Systems Inc. in August 2014.
• Canadian digital-wallet provider UGO Mobile Solutions LP launched a host card emulation service and adopted Visa Inc.’s tokenization technology for the UGO Wallet app for Android devices.
• Chipmaker NXP Semiconductors NV introduced a solution set for point-of-sale readers, SLN-POS-RDR, that speeds clients’ ability to launch contact and contactless payment systems. The product will start shipping to new customers in the third quarter.
