Credit Cards

The story of debit cards in the pandemic year of 2020 turns out to have several chapters—including higher average tickets, a sharp swing to card-not-present usage, a dramatic surge in contactless adoption, and higher mobile-wallet usage. Meanwhile, account-to-account transfers turned out to be the fastest-growing form of debit, though usage …

Open banking has been a big trend in payments for some time, and now traditional payment processors are getting in on the action. Paysafe Group Holdings Ltd. early on Monday announced it has agreed to pay $441 million to acquire Miami-based SafetyPay, a 15-year-old provider of digital payments for cash-paying …

Mastercard Inc. said it will slowly phase out the requirement that its branded cards have a magnetic stripe in favor of the EMV chip. Beginning in 2024, in most markets, newly issued Mastercard credit and debit cards will not be required to bear the magstripe. By 2033, Mastercard said none of …

Western Union Business Solutions (WUBS), formerly a unit of the Western Union group of companies, will rename itself Convera upon its recently announced $910-million acquisition by Goldfinch Partners LLC and The Baupost Group LLC. Patrick Gauthier, most recently head of Amazon Pay, has been announced as chief executive of Convera, which …

In response to small and mid-size businesses’ need for capital as the economy re-opens in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, payment-technology provider Veem Inc. on Thursday introduced two new short-term lending options as part of its Veem Capital offering. The first option, Pay Later, allows small and mid-size businesses …

EBay Inc. reported some 80% of its on-platform payments volume was processed through its managed-payments service by the end of the second quarter. More than 13 million sellers globally were using the platform.Payment card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. said consumers’ shift to contactless cards, which command a higher price than ordinary plastic, helped drive …

Vehicle-based payments got a boost Wednesday with BlackBerry Ltd.’s introduction of a new app to enable secure payments from a car’s dashboard. The app, which leverages the concept of the connected car, acts like a mobile wallet that connects to a payment network to enable a variety of transactions, including …

With a Federal Reserve deadline hitting Wednesday for comments on decade-old debit card regulations, large merchants are firing some last-minute salvos in hopes of influencing the Fed to make major revisions to rules governing transaction routing and pricing. “[M]ajor banks and networks continue to interfere with competition for debit business,” …

With credit card acceptance rates expected to rise next spring, payments-technology firms are starting to launch services for merchants that they say will soften the blow. The latest comes in the automobile-repair industry with an announcement Tuesday by Facepay Inc. of general availability of a service aimed at replacing credit …

Grocers and convenience stores that use distributor Hardec’s to buy products to sell now have an online and digital payment option. Omaha, Neb.-based Financial Transmission Network Inc. said it is supplying Hardec’s with an online payment portal that enables its customers to pay invoices via automated clearing house transactions and …