Competitive Strategies

Stolen identity information obtained by several Russian defendants named in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller’s indictment, released last week, was used to create fraudulent PayPal Holdings Inc. accounts. The defendants were named in connection with alleged activities surrounding the 2016 presidential election. The indictment provides details about an alleged conspiracy …

Capping an eventful week for cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is now trading above $11,000 for the first time in three weeks. Even more important, the fees its users must pay when they spend Bitcoin—which had soared into the stratosphere in recent months— have crashed back to earth, according to data available Monday …

Some 61% of consumers surveyed in the fourth quarter by New York City-based Auriemma Consulting Group cited a debit card as their most frequently used card, up from 52% a year earlier. Only 24% named a credit card, down from 35% at the end of 2016. “Based on our consumer …

BuyerDocs has been formed to secure wires for down payments made by home buyers from hacking, phishing, imposters, and spoofing. Wire fraud plundered approximately $1 billion from the real-estate industry in 2017, the company says. The Smart Payment Association and payment card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. announced that CPI …

The efforts of 18 U.S. senators to persuade the Senate Appropriations Committee to honor state laws for legal cannabis are not expected to sway Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. to drop their prohibitions on marijuana-related purchases over their networks. Earlier this week, a group spearheaded by Sens. Michael Bennett (D) …

The cryptocurrency Litecoin was still riding high Friday morning following a mid-week announcement that a new entity called LitePay Inc. will provide merchant processing in 41 countries, including the United States, starting Feb. 26. As of mid-morning, Litecoin traded at $220, up 38% from $160 at noon Tuesday. Also this …

The Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc. and the PCI Security Standards Council announced they will jointly develop a unified PIN-security standard. Currently each organization maintains a separate standard for PIN use, which could result in an entity being subject to one or both of the existing standards. The joint effort …

While the U.S. Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point initiative ended last year, over-zealous efforts by other federal agencies threaten law-abiding payments companies in the same way Choke Point did, the chief executive of the Electronic Transactions Association warned Congress on Thursday. Testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on …

More sales on its commerce platform and more payment-processing business from its merchants translated into a 71% revenue increase for Shopify Inc. in the fourth quarter. And the big merchant acquirer Global Payments Inc. reported Thursday that its North American revenues grew 9% in the quarter. Ottawa, Ontario-based Shopify, which …

Currencycloud, an international payments platform based in the United Kingdom, has hired a U.S. general manager in a push to capture more cross-border payments volume from U.S. merchants. Currencycloud announced Richard Arundel as the general manager of Currencycloud North America. Arundel, a co-founder of Currencycloud, spent the past two years …