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n Dennes, who joined Huntington in September after helping to launch a popular mobile-capture application at USAA Federal Savings Bank, says the bank has “interest” in a point-of-sale payments capability, likely based on near-field communication (NFC) chips. Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., Google Inc., and a carrier-led joint venture called …
Read More »Bling Nation’s Pause to Retool Likely to Leave It Behind Rivals
Slow acceptance among merchants and consumers appears to be the underlying cause for Bling Nation’s decision to suspend operation of its PayConnect and FanConnect mobile services. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bling said earlier this week that it is pausing operations to retool its services in response to feedback from merchants …
Read More »Wells, BofA Walk Away from Pariter, Their Joint ACH Processing Platform
Three years after introducing a joint venture aimed at processing automated clearing house transactions between the two banks, Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America Corp. have abandoned the operation, which they called Pariter. “It will shut down over the next few weeks,” a Wells spokesperson tells Digital …
Read More »Forget PayPal And Google. Acquirers Are Most Worried About Visa, MasterCard
n n n The source of such fears is a fast-changing landscape in which all the payment card networks are looking for new revenues and markets. “Some of my clients are freaking out, without naming names,” says Adil Moussa, an analyst at Boston-based Aite. Card networks are already direct …
Read More »AmEx To Beef up Marketing for Serve in Wake of Promising Pilot Results
American Express Co. will step up marketing of its Serve digital payment system early in the third quarter, following encouraging results from a pilot in Eugene, Ore., says David Messenger, executive vice president of online and mobile, American Express. “We’ve done a market test in Eugene and got some …
Read More »PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching To Build Its Mobile-Payments Team
n The first eBay/PayPal executive to go to Google, Stephanie Tilenius, aggressively pursued Osama Bedier, PayPal’s reluctant mobile-payments man, long before her separation agreement permitted her to do so, according to the suit. And Bedier discussed potential employment with Google while simultaneously negotiating a major business deal for PayPal …
Read More »The New BofA-Wells-Chase P2P Service Courts Potential Partners
The bubbling person-to-person payments market boiled over Wednesday when mega banks Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. announced a joint P2P service dubbed clearXchange. While currently limited to the banks’ customers, clearXchange could be integrated with other P2P systems, and possibly even become …
Read More »PayPal’s Mobile Plans: POS Payments This Year And $7.5 Billion in Volume by 2013
PayPal Inc. is dropping any pretense of not pursuing point-of-sale payments directly. The eBay Inc. subsidiary now promises that it has new services coming for paying at physical locations using smart phones. Third-party software developers for several years have been designing various apps that have blurred the line between …
Read More »A Private Investment Firm Picks up Regulus, J&B for $137 Million
In a deal that underscores the growing importance of electronic billing and presentment, New York City-based private-investment firm Cerberus Capital Management has agreed to buy the Regulus and J&B Software payments units from India-based 3i Infotech Ltd. The deal, valued at $137 million, is expected to close within about …
Read More »Justice Department Seeks to Block VeriFone-Hypercom Merger on Antitrust Grounds
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit Thursday to stop VeriFone Systems Inc. from buying Hypercom Corp., saying the proposed $485 million stock deal “would substantially reduce competition in the U.S. point-of-sale terminal market.” The DoJ said the current plan to sell most of Hypercom’s U.S. assets to the North …
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