News

April, 2017

• 20 April

  A New Shopify Card Reader Supports EMV And Bluetooth for Small Sellers

  

  Shopify Inc. is often thought of as a platform for smaller e-commerce merchants, but it offers processing services for some 65,000 physical-world sellers, as well, and on Thursday it unveiled a new EMV card reader that features a Bluetooth low-energy link to mobile devices and what the company says is …
• 20 April

  Digital Channels Help a Recovering American Express Add Cardholders

  

  Still smarting from the loss of its big cobranded card and acceptance relationship with Costco Wholesale Corp. last June, American Express Co. managed to beat analysts’ earnings estimates in the first quarter and said it has planted the seeds for future growth. As an example, AmEx said its efforts to …
• 20 April

  Apriva Receives EMV Certifications and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • Mastercard Inc. said it has completed testing of a biometric-enabled payment card in South Africa. The card contains fingerprint scanning technology. Cardholders enroll their fingerprints at their financial institutions, which are then stored as a digital template on the card. The card can be used in an EMV point-of-sale terminal. Mastercard …
• 20 April

  Credit Gets the Credit for Visa’s Higher Quarterly Volumes in the U.S.

  

  Boosted by the addition of two big U.S. credit card programs and its June 2016 acquisition of Visa Europe, just about every operational metric that matters increased by 20% or more for Visa Inc. in the quarter ending March 31. The major exception was U.S. debit, which grew in only …
• 19 April

  New Bots Emerge on Messenger for Eateries, Grocery Delivery, And Money Transfer

  

  Are so-called bots the future of commerce? The digital gadgets took another step in that direction Tuesday with a flurry of announcements at a Facebook conference regarding new bot launches on the social network’s massive Messenger app. Mastercard Inc. said it has enabled its Masterpass digital wallet for use with …
• 19 April

  Higher Merchant and Cardholder Payment Volumes Boost U.S. Bancorp’s Revenues

  

  U.S. Bancorp, owner of the big merchant acquirer Elavon Inc., generated 36% of its first-quarter non-interest income from payments, according to the Minneapolis-based company’s first-quarter earnings report released Wednesday. U.S. Bancorp reported $849 million of its total $2.33 billion in non-interest income came from payment sources such merchant fees, interchange …
• 19 April

  Surcharging Programs May Appeal to Merchants, But ISOs And Acquirers Like Them, Too

  

  Offering a surcharging or cash-discounting program to merchants has obvious revenue benefits to merchants, but they have the potential to grow an independent sales organization’s or acquirer’s bottom line, too. Such programs enable merchants to cover their costs to accept credit card transactions by adding a fee to the purchase …
• 19 April

  USA Technologies in Ingenico Deal and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • USA Technologies Inc. announced it will work with point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico to make Ingenico contact-EMV hardware available to providers of vending machines and other unattended terminals that use USAT’s network for contactless payments. • In related news, Mastercard Inc. said it is making its Masterpass digital wallet available for purchases …
• 18 April

  U.S. ATM EMV Conversion Well Past Halfway Point Halfway Between Network Liability Shifts

  

  About 60% of the nation’s approximately 450,000 ATMs can now accept EMV chip cards, according to industry executives familiar with the years-long process of transitioning from magnetic-stripe cards. “We look at true chip transactions that are coming from terminals,” says Bruce Owens, vice president of product for the North American …
• 18 April

  PayPal Furthers Its In-Store Ambitions With Deals With Android Pay And Wells Fargo

  

  When PayPal Holdings Inc. made deals last year with Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., Citigroup Inc., and Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), one key part of the agreements was access to the card networks’ tokenization engines to reach bank-issued payment cards. On Tuesday,