Acquiring

What’s the future of electronic payments? For many consumers, it’s one that incorporates biometrics for authentication and payments, finds a survey from Viewpost IP Holdings LLC, a business-to-business payments provider. In the survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, Viewpost found that 50% believe fingerprint technology—already in use with many …

Payments provider North American Bancard Holdings LLC said it completed its acquisition of Total Merchant Services Inc. The combined company now processes nearly $50 billion in payments annually. FitPay Inc., a provider of payment-authentication technology, said it will offer prepaid capability on contactless-enabled wearable devices through a FitPay prepaid Mastercard. The program will allow …

When fraudsters launch a cyber attack, they may not be their target’s worst enemy. Equally troublesome could be the business’s own staff, according to results of a survey of 5,000 companies around the world released Monday by Kaspersky Lab, a Moscow-based global cybersecurity firm. It turns out employees not only …

Online-payments provider Stripe Inc. now allows merchants on its platform to accept payments from Chinese consumers through links to the China-based Alipay and WeChat Pay systems, Reuters reported. At a valuation of $9.2 billion, 7-year-old Stripe is the most valuable privately held payments startup. Alibaba Group, the China-based online marketplace, has launched the Taobao Group …

Israelis are much more likely to use mobile-banking apps and mobile wallets than Americans, but at least Americans are less inclined to use cash than Germans, according to a recent international survey of consumer usage of financial technology. The May survey of 5,860 adults in the United States, United Kingdom, …

USA Technologies Inc., a provider of contactless-payment devices for vending machines, announced an expanded agreement with JPMorgan Chase & Co. to market cashless-payment capability in self-serve markets. Fast-casual restaurant chain Panera Bread Co. gets more than a quarter of its orders through digital order-ahead transactions, and that excludes digital orders that are paid …

There’s nothing new about application programming interfaces. The code has been around for years, streamlining payments flows between otherwise unrelated apps. Recently, APIs have made possible the seamless integrations that mobile-payments users now take for granted. But now a group of payments executives are starting to worry that proprietary API …

The stock market has had a pretty good run so far this year, but shares of publicly traded payments firms are doing even better than the overall market. A group of thirty payment-related stocks tracked by Chicago-based Barrington Research Associates Inc. posted a mean return of 23.86% for the first …

Merchant cash-advance provider CAN Capital Inc. said it has returned to funding following a recapitalization by Varadero Capital, an alternative asset manager. CAN Capital said it will immediately begin funding small merchants eligible for renewal. It will work with a select set of sales partners for new merchant advances. Its products include term …

In a play for scale in a rapidly expanding e-commerce market, Vantiv Inc. on Wednesday agreed to buy the United Kingdom-based processor Worldpay Group plc for approximately $9.9 billion. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which had also expressed interest in Worldpay, has withdrawn from the bidding. The boards of the two …