Marketing

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The ride-sharing service Uber is strongly associated with mobile apps, not with plastic. But prepaid card providers such as Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. are finding new opportunities in the so-called sharing economy exemplified by Uber, in which drivers using their own vehicles offer taxi-like services to riders. …

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews Online merchants are dreading an onslaught of fraud, but what they should really brace for is a much bigger problem: so-called new version, which comes from EMVCo, the standards body controlled by the global card brands, will work in-app as well as within browser-based shopping sessions and …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews As payments firms seek to commercialize emerging online marketplaces, they’re starting to leverage automated routines that promise to overturn traditional transaction methods and, just possibly, deliver on the long-sought goal of so-called frictionless payments. This week, both MasterCard Inc. and PayPal Holdings Inc. announced new initiatives …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While many experts have cited anecdotal evidence that more consumers would adopt and use mobile wallets if they could earn, manage, and redeem

By Peter Lucas@DTPaymentNews Payment processor Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) is rolling out Premium Payback, a rewards-redemption application that allows consumers to cash out rewards earned on credit and debit cards at the point of sale through participating merchants. FIS, which piloted Premium Payback at more than 7,000 BP …

By Rick Oglesby Visa Inc. chief executive officer Charlie Scharf and MasterCard Inc. CEO Ajay Banga must be all smiles these days. PayPal Holdings Inc. CEO Dan Schulman was clearly motivated to make peace with

• A consumer class-action lawsuit filed by the United Kingdom government’s former financial-services ombudsman against MasterCard Inc. seeks 14 billion pounds ($18.6 billion) in damages for allegedly charging excessive merchant fees between 1992 and 2008, expenses merchants passed on to consumers. In a statement, MasterCard said it “firmly” disagrees with …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Gift card marketers have dominated the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions in recent years, but now a card is coming to thousands of those checkout-lane racks that will let budding investors buy or give away shares of stock in a favorite company.

“Selling boxes is an unpredictable thing,” Paul Galant, chief executive of VeriFone Systems Inc., told stock analysts Thursday afternoon. Seldom has that been truer for terminal kingpin VeriFone than now, when an unexpected slowdown in EMV adoption by small and medium-size merchants has cut into the company’s sales and hurt …

By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews The big banks that run clearXchange are getting around to slapping a brand name on the peer-to-peer payments network, five years after founding it. The new name is going to be Zelle, confirms a spokesperson for Early Warning Services LLC, the Scottsdale, Ariz.-based fraud-management company that real-time …