Fraud & Security

As technology firms, both within financial services and those entering it, take larger shares of banking revenue streams and become more like banks, financial institutions will beef up their tech investments as they attempt to counter this pressure, advises Aite Group LLC in a report on 2018 financial-services trends. In …

The Western Union Co. and the New York Department of Financial Services announced Thursday that the wire-transfer market leader will pay a $60 million fine to settle alleged violations of the state’s anti-money-laundering laws, including transactions that supported human trafficking from China. New York authorities alleged that between 2004 and …

If you ask consultants what’s holding back mobile payments in the United States, you’ll get answers ranging from lack of acceptance ubiquity to malfunctions at the point of sale to consumers’ perceptions that payment cards work just fine. Now the nation’s financial institutions have weighed in on the matter, and …

Boosted by e-commerce sales, growth in credit card payments far outpaced growth in debit card and automated clearing house payments in 2016, according to newly released findings from the Federal Reserve. Credit card transactions grew 10.2% from 2015’s levels to 37.3 billion and were valued at $3.27 trillion, the Fed …

Some 55% of all U.S. storefronts were accepting EMV chip cards as of September, according to the latest quarterly data from Visa Inc., released Monday. That comes to more than 2.5 million merchant locations, up 9% from June and 538% from September 2015, when 392,000 locations were accepting chip cards …

The PCI Security Standards Council named Lance J. Johnson to the executive director position. Johnson, who had been chief operating officer at Sequent Software Inc. for the past five years and spent 20 years at Visa Inc., replaces Stephen W. Orfei, the general manager who left earlier this year after …

The blockchain, mobile commerce, fraud, data breaches, and authentication were all hot payments topics in 2017. Expect that to continue into 2018 if the prognostications from several payments executives hold true. Much of their outlook centers on identity and authentication, especially as data breaches, large and small, continue to wreak …

Paris-based defense, aerospace, and transportation contractor Thales S.A. announced Monday that it has a €4.8 billion ($5.66 billion) deal to acquire Gemalto N.V., the world’s largest maker of chips for smart cards and mobile phones. The announcement that Thales plans to buy Gemalto for €51 per share ($60.1) comes just …

Santa Claus might be relaxing on Dec. 25, but criminals targeting online merchants with stolen credit and debit cards won’t be taking the day off. That’s evident from Stripe Inc.’s latest report on online fraud trends and behavior. Released this week, the report, which examines an undisclosed number of transactions made …

Wider availability of technology that would have been nearly unthinkable only a few years ago is making biometric authentication a more likely replacement for the password. In the latest development, Discover Financial Services on Thursday announced users of its mobile app who own an iPhone X can log in to …