Credit Cards

Bank of America Corp.’s Merrill Lynch subsidiary on Monday announced enhanced capabilities for its Virtual Payables service, including the ability by corporate card-using businesses to create single-use account numbers in real time. In addition to the single-use card numbers, businesses with a BofA Merrill purchasing card can connect directly to …

About a year later than it intended, Amazon.com Inc. on Monday opened to the public an 1,800-square-foot convenience store in Seattle that promises to streamline physical shopping and payment as the company has for decades smoothed out the wrinkles in e-commerce. Along with Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition last year of …

Unlike its rivals Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., American Express Inc. depends crucially on revenue from the fees it charges merchants for acceptance. These fees, in fact, account for 57% of the company’s overall revenues net of interest expense. So it came as no surprise that AmEx’s top brass spent …

With the merger between Vantiv Inc. and Worldpay plc finalized, the combined organization, known as Worldpay Inc., will get to the tasks at hand, says Shane Happach, Worldpay executive vice president and head of its global enterprise e-commerce. Chief among them will be developing its technology and growing the company, …

Financial-services providers experienced a 105% increase in the fraudster attack rate from 2015 through 2017, reports ThreatMetrix Inc., an authentication and fraud-mitigation provider, in its “Cybercrime Report 2017: A Year in Review,” released on Tuesday. E-commerce merchants, too, experienced greater fraud, with the log-in attack rate growing by 170% from …

Cardlytics Inc., which analyzed 18 billion U.S. purchases in 2016 from customers of more than 1,600 financial institutions, last week filed for an initial public offering of stock that it hopes will raise $75 million in gross proceeds to further expand its marketing platforms. Atlanta-based Cardlytics was founded in 2008 …

When major technology companies started launching mobile-payments services a few years ago, many observers figured digitized and tokenized card credentials would soon replace old-fashioned plastic. But now, the chronically sluggish adoption and usage rates these mobile wallets have registered is lending new life to plastic cards. The twist is that …

Visa Inc.’s announcement Friday that it will make signature authentication optional for EMV contact and contactless transactions in North America starting in April might provide another boost for merchants who have yet to adopt chip-card acceptance, suggests an analyst. Signatures remain a requirement for Visa magnetic stripe-based transactions not subject to …

Visa Inc. is joining the other three card brands in making signatures optional for many of its transactions beginning in April. The card brand, which had credit card volume of $499 billion and debit volume of $388 billion in its fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, says in a blog post published …

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets and the biggest bank that runs its own merchant-acquiring operation, reported Friday that it processed $1.19 trillion in payment volume from merchants last year, up 12% from $1.06 trillion in 2016. Chase’s merchant volume rose 13% in 2017’s fourth quarter …