Law and Regulation

A five-year-old lawsuit brought by payday lenders against federal banking regulators over the government’s controversial Operation Choke Point ended with a settlement this week. Advance America, Cash Advance Centers Inc. (Advance America), and Check Into Cash had sued the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of …

With momentum building to ban cashless stores, a rough consensus seems to be emerging that the United States will never have the cashless society futurists have predicted for decades as first cards, then e-commerce, and now mobile payments took root. To be sure, research released Tuesday by Square Inc. shows …

Nxgen International Inc. acquired payments provider Payment Plus Inc. for an undisclosed amount. PPI will continue to grow its business in Kentucky and the Midwest, Nxgen said. Card-issuing platform Marqeta said it raised $260 million in Series E funding, placing the company’s value at almost $2 billion. Marqeta said the …

A federal judge has ordered the two main perpetrators of what the Federal Trade Commission calls the “massive Pointbreak Media robocall scheme,” part of which involved remotely created checks, to pay $3.37 million to the FTC, the agency announced this week. U.S. District Court Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga in Miami …

Processor Adyen N.V. said ride-share service Uber will use Adyen’s 3-D Secure service online and in-app. 3-D Secure is an online authentication standard that, now in its second iteration, uses multiple bits of data to verify elements of a transaction. Unlike the first version, 3-D Secure 2 aims to be …

POSaBIT, a point-of-sale services provider for cannabis retailers, said an analysis of “hundreds of thousands” of transactions at more than 120 California, Washington, and Colorado stores found that consumers belonging to a cannabis retailer’s loyalty rewards program had a 28% higher average ticket value and visited the store more frequently …

Transaction and dollar volume for Priority Technology Holdings Inc. managed to grow in the first quarter despite the downsizing of the merchant processor’s formerly large online subscription-billing business. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Priority reported Monday that merchant bank card processing volume rose 8.8% to $9.9 billion versus $9.1 billion in 2018’s first …

Will it or won’t it? Those eagerly awaiting word about whether the Federal Reserve will directly operate a real-time gross settlement system will have to wait a bit longer. The Fed last October said it was considering whether to directly develop and operate a RTGS system as an outgrowth of …

Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on Tuesday said it expects to close its colossal $43 billion acquisition of payment processor Worldpay Inc. in the third quarter following a Federal Trade Commission ruling. The merger, announced in March, would create a processing colossus with payments services ranging from merchant processing, …

Former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Robert O. Carr has agreed to pay a $250,628 civil penalty to settle an insider-trading complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to court documents filed this week. Carr did not admit or deny the SEC’s allegations, according to filings in …