Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Payment provider CardConnect released a beta version of Bolt P2PE, its cloud-based API terminal service that enables software companies to integrate their applications with PCI-validated point-to-point encryption and EMV devices for card-present transactions. • Wizard World Inc., producer of such pop culture events as Comic Con, is working with Front Gate Tickets for …
December, 2016
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20 December
Updates From NFC Forum Include Ability to Show Tickets When Smart Phone Is Off
The NFC Forum, the Wakefield, Mass.-based organization that supports near-field communication technology, on Monday announced updates to three technical specifications and introduced a “candidate” spec. NFC is the technology most often used, for example, to link mobile wallets with point-of-sale terminals. One update, to “NFC Controller Interface (NCI) Technical Specification Version 2.0,” …
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20 December
The Proliferation of Chatbots for Payments And Banking Begins to Raise Security Questions
An offshoot of artificial-intelligence research, chatbots emerged in 2016 as a popular technology for reaching and serving consumers for banking, payments, and shopping. Facebook’s Messenger app, which began supporting the bits of code this spring, was by September already crawling with 30,000 bots holding conversations with consumers to fulfill simple …
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20 December
Mobile In-Store Payments Poised for Growth and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Mobile in-store payments will total $91.7 billion by 2020, up from $18.7 billion this year, according to a report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Browser-based and in-app mobile payments, however, will dwarf that number, reaching $318.8 billion, nearly doubling 2016’s $161.3 billion. • Movie-ticketing platform Atom Tickets will integrate JPMorgan Chase & …
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20 December
A Cross-Border Payments Startup Promises to Make the Blockchain Less ‘Intimidating’
Startups and established players alike have been working out payments applications for distributed-ledger technology for several years, and on Thursday one of those applications went commercial. San Francisco-based Wyre, founded in 2013, launched its cross-border payments service based on the blockchain. On the same day, Wyre also raised $5.8 million in a …
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20 December
Google Wallet Gets New Browser Capability and Moves Beyond Mobile Devices
Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit has updated its Google Wallet to enable the person-to-person payments service to work on desktop computers and laptops using any browser. Google Wallet dates back to 2011 as a mobile-payments and P2P service, but in September 2015 Alphabet transferred the purchasing functionality to its Android Pay …
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20 December
Holiday E-Commerce Spending Grows 12% So Far This Year, Reflecting Confident Shoppers
Consumers are making their shopping, and payments, preferences known this holiday season. They are spending 12% more on e-commerce purchases so far this shopping season than they did in 2015, reports comScore Inc. Consumers have made $49.3 billion in e-commerce purchases from Nov. 1 to Dec. 12 using a desktop computer at home …
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15 December
1 Billion Yahoo Accounts Breached and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Yahoo! Inc. disclosed Wednesday a breach of more than 1 billion user accounts in August 2013 that is separate from one involving 500 million accounts the Web giant announced in September. Yahoo said the new breach involved names, email addresses, birth dates, secure passwords, and security questions and answers, but did not …
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15 December
Fraudsters Targeting Mid-Priced Luxury Goods, Refurbished Electronics This Holiday Season
Tougher security vetting by high-end luxury goods retailers has online fraudsters moving downscale to the still-profitable mid-price range, and crooks also are targeting refurbished consumer electronics, according to new findings from security technology firm Forter Inc. Forter, which has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, Israel, this week released …
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15 December
PayPal Follows Up on Visa And MasterCard Pacts With Citi And FIS Agreements for 2017
After PayPal Holdings Inc. in July signed a sweeping agreement with Visa Inc., and in September reached a similar deal with MasterCard Inc., giving PayPal access to the card networks’ token engines and thereby new access to the physical point of sale, observers wondered when the other shoe would drop. It dropped …
