Law and Regulation

Mastercard Inc. announced early Thursday it has acquired cybersecurity firm Recorded Future for $2.65 billion. The acquisition builds on Mastercard’s strategy of investing in fraud detection and cyber defense technologies, the network says. The deal also enhances Mastercard’s identity, fraud prevention, real-time decisioning, and cybersecurity services for merchants and financial …

Fraud attacks initiated by automated bots using artificially generated images, also known as deepfakes, are becoming a major problem in the payments industry, according to a report Wednesday from AU10TIX, a provider of identity-verification and risk-management technology. Overall, 32% of all Internet traffic during the second quarter was driven by …

Retailing giant Costco Wholesale Corp. has contracted with technology company Vontier to install new payments devices and software at the chain’s 76 fueling stations in Canada, starting next month. Vontier two years ago acquired Invenco, a company that included long-time fueling-technology provider Gilbarco Veeder-Root. Payment processor Silverflow said it has reached a new agreement …

Merchants in the United States paid $224 billion in card-acceptance costs in 2023, the highest toll for merchants in any country in the world, according to payment consultancy CMSPI’s State of the Industry Report. Interchange fees alone accounted for $143 billion of that total. Since 2009, U.S. merchants’ like-for-like payment …

Adyen NV early Monday began launching what its calls an intelligent-routing service for debit cards intended to reduce merchants’ debit-acceptance costs and increase authorizations for purchases. The service, which enables Adyen to choose which network to route transactions over, was developed primarily in response to the Federal Reserve’s 2023 statement …

MyKaarma, a payments service for automobile dealers, said its surcharge service, myKaarma Surcharge, has achieved compliance with Honest Pricing Laws that have been enacted in several states, including California and New York. Surcharging allows merchants to add their cost of credit card acceptance to a bill when a customer presents a credit …

The U.S. Department of Transportation is looking into airline rewards programs with an eye on protecting consumers from potential unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices, the department says. Many consumers use cobranded airline credit cards to earn points in these programs, though the DOT’s focus is on rewards, not on card-issuing …

Electronic Merchant Systems LLC is teaming up with LegitScript to give its health-care merchants access to a certification tag, while InvoiceCloud says Western National Insurance Group picked it for a new digital-payment and policyholder-relations service. Cleveland-based EMS, which processes approximately $6 billion in annual volume for 25,000 merchants, says the …

Retailers providing cash-back services at the point of sale fill a void for many consumers who may live in so-called banking deserts, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says in a new report on the service. Some, however, charge a fee for that access, along with other banking hurdles. The Cash-back …

When the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments service debuted commercially 13 months ago, the story mainly focused on the general concept of immediate money transfers. But since then the payments industry has been busy refining that concept and working on service-ready applications. One of the most talked-about of these applications …