Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Todd Ablowitz If you’ve attended any acquirers’ conferences, tuned into industry news, or followed payments trends this past year, you’ve surely noticed a common topic: “Should we beware of Square?” Square has created quite a stir by growing in just three years from a Silicon Valley startup to a …
Read More »Thanksgiving Weekend Shopping Numbers Generally Soar Upward Vs. Last Year
The reports about consumer spending over the long Thanksgiving shopping period extending into today, Cyber Monday, continue to flow ad nauseam in the mainstream press. Digital Transactions News sifted through the statistical stew to find the numerical nuggets of greatest interest to merchant acquirers. The early data indicate that, when …
Read More »Visa Says New Online Authentication Tool Will Cut Risk While Reducing Abandonment
With the fabled Cyber Monday shopping frenzy under way, Visa Inc. launched an authentication tool for online transactions intended to cut fraud while reducing the risk of shopping-cart abandonment. The tool, which Visa calls its Consumer Authentication Service, can be deployed by any Visa issuer starting on Monday. The network …
Read More »Exceeding $700 Million, Payments Investment in 2012 Could Be Most Seen Since 2001
Venture-capital and private-equity investors are on pace to meet or exceed the $753 million they infused into the payments industry in 2011, the most since the $1.4 billion they invested in payments in 2001. Through the first three quarters of 2012, venture-capital and private-equity investors pumped $711 million into startup …
Read More »Pressing Acquisition Strategy, TSYS Uses ProPay Deal to Get into Mobile Acceptance
Total System Services Inc.’s announcement late last week that it has agreed to buy ProPay Inc. is the latest chapter in TSYS’s strategy of bulking up its position in the merchant-acquiring business through acquisitions. The deal will also hand the Columbus, Ga.-based processor a key stake in the rapidly growing …
Read More »BAMS Breaks into Mobile Acceptance with a Service that Eschews Aggregation
Just when observers might have thought the mobile-acceptance market couldn’t get more crowded, merchant processor Bank of America Merchant Services LLC on Tuesday announced a service called Mobile Pay on Demand. And while the service includes the now familiar card-reading dongle for attachment to a smart phone, it also features …
Read More »Boston Rail Commuters Get the Nation’s First Smart-Phone Fare App
While some transit agencies are in the process of implementing or mulling fare systems that will accept general-purpose contactless chip cards, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and vendor Masabi US Ltd. on Monday rolled out a smart-phone ticketing app for Boston commuter-rail passengers that requires no big capital investment in …
Read More »ShopKeep Pushes Trend Toward a Tablet-Based POS Managed from the Cloud
While much of the payments industry’s attention is on mobile payments, mobile technology is also starting to transform the traditional retail checkout. This week, a tablet-based point-of-sale startup called ShopKeep POS launched software to keep track of employee hours and to let restaurants modify orders on the fly. Also this …
Read More »Starbucks Debuts ‘Square Lite’ in 7,000 Stores, But More Features Are Coming
Three months after announcing their partnership, mobile-payments provider Square Inc. and coffee king Starbucks Corp. said Starbucks customers could now use the Square Wallet for purchases at 7,000 company-operated U.S. locations. The purchase process at Starbucks will be a bit different for users of the consumer-facing Square Wallet, formerly known …
Read More »Holding Patents on Mobile Acceptance, a Small Firm Won’t Rule out ‘Legal Remedies’
With a pair of U.S patents in hand, a small, Montreal-based engineering firm may have placed itself in a position to strongly influence the fast-growing market for mobile card acceptance. The patents, awarded last month to AnywhereCommerce, cover payments via a dongle connected to a mobile device’s audio jack, a …
Read More »