As they have for rival Visa Inc., transaction volumes are continuing to improve for Mastercard Inc. as world commerce stages its recovery from the impact of the pandemic. “The strong momentum we started the year with accelerated this quarter,” chief executive Michael Miebach said Thursday morning during a session with …
Read More »Zelle Volume up 68% and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 7/29/21
The Zelle peer-to-peer payment network processed $120 billion on 436 million transactions in the second quarter, up 58% and 68%, respectively, year-over-year, according to network operator Early Warning Services LLC.Card-present transactions at small businesses are up 83% over the pre-Covid baseline of March 2020, according to the latest CardFlight Small Business Report. The …
Read More »PayPal’s CEO Promises an ‘Aggressive’ Play for Merchant Business in the Wake of New Pricing
PayPal’s boss made a declaration Wednesday afternoon that may have been as much a warning to incumbent merchant acquirers as it was a promise to storefront merchants. Referring to PayPal’s new transaction pricing schedule, expected to go into effect Aug. 2, chief executive Dan Schulman made it clear PayPal will …
Read More »Euronet’s Revenue Jumps 35% and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 7/28/21
Euronet Worldwide Inc., a Kansas-based company that provides digital-payments services in Europe, reported second-quarter revenue of $714.7 million, up 35% year-over-year.Chargebee Inc., a subscription and recurring-billing platform, announced an update that includes automated usage-based billing, dedicated data centers, item-level discounts, and new checkout features.IR, whose technology enables merchants to analyze …
Read More »Fiserv’s Acquiring Unit Rides to New Heights on the Back of Tech Like Clover and Carat
If there are lingering doubts about a big comeback for the big merchant processors, Fiserv Inc. may well have dispelled them early Tuesday with results showing 43% second-quarter growth in revenue year-over-year for the company’s merchant-acceptance unit. That performance comes on top of a near-doubling in payment volume for the …
Read More »Nacha Volume Increases 10% and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 7/27/21
Nacha, the governing body for the automated clearing house system, said the ACH network processed 7.3 billion payments in the second quarter, a 10% increase from 6.6 billion payments in the same period a year ago. Particularly strong growth in business-to-business payment volume helped boost the result. Nacha said that …
Read More »How the Pandemic Has Forced Changes in the Way Acquirers Approach—And Sell to—Merchants
Ever since the Covid pandemic set in more than a year ago, the payments industry has been abuzz with talk about its various impacts on merchant acceptance. What hasn’t received as much attention is how the pandemic has affected merchant acquiring. It turns out processors and independent sales organizations have …
Read More »Consumer Spending Helps Put AmEx Within a Whisker of Pre-Pandemic Times
American Express Co. posted second-quarter numbers Friday indicating the card giant is very nearly back to its pre-pandemic performance and reflecting a steady recovery from the travel restrictions that hampered the company for most of 2020. Driving the improved results was steady improvement in the company’s vital travel-and-entertainment business and …
Read More »COMMENTARY: Could PayPal’s Latest Fee Boost Make It the Merchant Lobby’s Next Target?
The yin and yang of political, and ferociously commercial, PayPal was vividly on display with its announcement last month of a massive price hike. The e-commerce phenom attaches itself to an array of woke causes but remains a wonderfully hard-nosed commercial enterprise, keen to be fully compensated for the enormous value …
Read More »Visa Agrees to Lay out Nearly $1 Billion to Acquire Britain’s Cross-Border Specialist Currencycloud
Visa Inc. has been concentrating on building out its “network-of-networks” strategy for some time, and it’s latest move in that project came early Thursday with the news that it has agreed to acquire Currency Cloud Ltd., a London-based developer of application programming interfaces that can simplify cross-border payments. The deal values …
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