Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
It's been implicit for a while, but eBay Inc. on Wednesday made it clear that it has big hopes for its PayPal payments subsidiary as the company evolves from its core Internet auction business. “PayPal's opportunity and its niche is to power all of e-commerce,” eBay president and chief executive …
Read More »Money Transmitters Shrug off Recession, Downplay New Channels
U.S. automakers and lots of banks are finding their business models under severe stress, but not so money-transfer businesses despite a likely decline in transfer volume this year, according to new research from Aite Group LLC. The industry, especially big players such as The Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International …
Read More »Visa’s payWave Platform Connects with the Vending Machine Market
Contactless payments took another incremental step recently when USA Technologies Inc. struck an agreement with Visa Inc. under which Visa will subsidize the deployment of up to 4,000 of USA Technologies' card-accepting devices for vending machines. The agreement, potentially worth $800,000, is significant because it is the first between Visa …
Read More »How a Shakeout in Processing Is Culling the Ranks of Major Players
Inexorable forces are reducing the ranks of payments processors and electronic bill-payment providers, as the planned buy-out of Metavante Corp. by Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) shows. Remaining ones such Online Resources Corp. are vulnerable to Wall Street pressure, as a proxy fight in progress shows. But some companies …
Read More »Eyeing New Markets, A Niche Payment Player Wards off Recession
The electronic-commerce payments market remains highly competitive despite the recession, and the online niche payment systems are trying to adapt their game plans to the fluid conditions. “The economy is helping us on the consumer side and the merchant side,” says Sergio Pinon, chief executive of eLayaway LLC, an online …
Read More »Tempo Plans Some Noise for a Quiet Decoupled Debit Card Market
The market for decoupled debit cards, which has been eerily silent for about a year, may soon be making waves again. An executive with Tempo Payments Inc., a non-bank processor with the only network-branded product on the market currently, said this week the company plans to launch a new product …
Read More »Surprise! Mobile-Banking Adoption Depends on Phone, Not Age
Consumers' propensity to use mobile devices to conduct banking functions depends on the sophistication of the device, not on the consumer's age, according to recent research. Indeed, mobile users equipped with iPhones or other touchscreen-enabled smart phones are far more likely to use the devices for mobile financial services than …
Read More »Internet Pioneer Case Promotes RevolutionCard to Audience of Bankers
Entrepreneur Steve Case, whose founding of America Online Inc. helped popularize the Internet, told an audience of bankers on Monday that his new venture is set to shake up electronic payments by dramatically slashing costs for merchants and consumers. Case's remarks came on the same day that venture, St. Petersburg, …
Read More »FIS’s Metavante Acquisition To Create a Processing Powerhouse
Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will buy Metavante Technologies Inc. in a $2.94 billion all-stock deal announced on Wednesday. The acquisition will create a bank- and payments-processing giant with $5 billion in combined revenue and a vast array of products in everything from core banking services to credit, debit, …
Read More »Contactless Stickers for Cell Phones Move onto Payments Networks
First Data Corp. announced on Tuesday it will use technology from Inside Contactless, a French chipmaker, for its Go-Tag product, a sticker that can be affixed to mobile phones to make them work like contactless-payment devices. Under the three-year agreement, Inside Contactless will supply so-called prelams, or chip-and-antenna elements, that …
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