Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Processing titan First Data Corp.’s return to the stock market Thursday was met with a tepid response from investors in the Atlanta-based company. First Data, which turned to the market to raise money to pay off debt, priced its initial public offering late Wednesday at $16 per share, which …
Read More »Square Files for IPO; Heading for More Than $32 Billion in Charge Volume
After alerting the investment community in July that it intended to file for an initial public offering of stock, merchant processor Square Inc. on Wednesday finally went public with its plans. San Francisco-based Square, which first made a name for itself by providing mobile-payment services to tiny businesses and individual …
Read More »Banking Kingpin Chase Prepares an ‘Aggressive’ Push for Its Own Digital Wallet
Another 800-pound gorilla will soon be promoting a digital wallet, only this time it’s not a technology firm. It’s JPMorgan Chase & Co., a world leader in payment card issuance and merchant acquiring. “We’re launching our own wallet. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it,” Mike Passilla, chief executive …
Read More »CurrentC Adding More Major Merchants in Columbus, ‘Open-Loop’ Cards To Come
Within a week, four more major retailers—ExxonMobil, Sears, Shell Oil, and WalMart—will join the CurrentC pilot that started last month in Columbus, Ohio. That’s according to Brian V. Mooney, a long-time processing executive who took over in April as interim chief executive of the mobile wallet’s sponsor organization, Merchant Customer …
Read More »Universal Offers Standards, Digital IDs Needed To Drive Wider Mobile-Wallet Adoption
Consumer confusion, lack of standards for offers, and splintered merchant acceptance continue to impede mobile-wallet adoption among consumers, but they are not expected to thwart the long-term prospects for the payments model, suggested panelists on Wednesday at the NFC Solutions Summit in Phoenix. Near-field communication (NFC) technology not only can …
Read More »Live Nation Whets Its POS Appetite With a Big Mobile and Fixed-Unit Deal from Appetize
Venue operator Live Nation Entertainment will install more than 4,400 fixed and mobile point-of-sale devices supplied by cloud-based mobile point-of-sale maker Appetize in 32 venues, Appetize announced Tuesday. Four-year-old Appetize says this is its largest single POS deployment yet. About half of the devices in the Live Nation deal …
Read More »Eye on Bitcoin: Ingenico’s Bitcoin-Accepting Terminal; Feds Set Final Silk Road Auction
Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group has teamed up with Bitcoin merchant acquirer BitPay Inc. to retrofit a traditional POS terminal for Bitcoin acceptance in stores. And the U.S. Marshals Service is planning to auction off the last of the Bitcoin that the FBI seized in 2013 when it busted Ross …
Read More »EMV Transition Marks Progress in Cards And Transactions, Evokes New Products
With the Oct. 1 liability-shift milestone passed, payments companies are reviewing progress so far and introducing new products to take advantage of the migration to EMV chip card payments. First up is MasterCard Inc., which says that “tens of millions” of chip-enabled transactions are being made in the United States. …
Read More »First Data Launches Its IPO With an Offering That Could Value Processor at $17.6 Billion
By John Stewart Payments-processing titan First Data Corp. on Thursday launched its long-awaited effort to go public with an initial offering of stock that would value the company at as much as $17.6 billion and raise as much as $3.2 billion. The IPO could well be the largest seen on …
Read More »Fraud-Weary Europeans Look Forward to the U.S. EMV Liability Shift
Stolen European payment card numbers and related data are popular imports in the U.S. black market, which is why European bankers, merchants and data-protection executives are looking forward to America’s EMV chip card liability shift that takes effect Thursday. That’s the word from Jeremy King, international director of the Wakefield, …
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