Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend $27.5 billion on gift cards this holiday season, up 5.8% from $26 billion in 2015. The increase follows the 18% plunge last year from $31.7 billion in 2014, which was the highest gift card spending total in at least seven years on NRF surveys. …
December, 2016
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1 December
Visa, MasterCard Postpone 2017 Fuel-Pump EMV Liability Shifts for Three Years
Citing the difficulties that gas stations are having in retrofitting fuel pumps to accept EMV chip cards, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are postponing their Oct. 1, 2017, EMV liability shift for U.S. automated fuel dispensers (AFDs) until Oct. 1, 2020. Visa announced the postponement in a blog posting early Thursday. The …
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1 December
Why Holiday Gift Card Loads Will Perk up
Retailers can expect a bump up in the dollars consumers load on closed-loop gift cards this holiday season as a festive spirit takes hold and more merchants favor the cards over holiday discounts, according to a forecast released last month by payments consultancy Mercator Advisory Group. “Retailers are expecting that …
November, 2016
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30 November
Valued at a Lofty $9.2 Billion, E-Commerce Specialist Stripe Shows Where the Action Is
By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Stripe Inc.’s latest funding round, in which the privately held San Francisco-based company nearly doubled its valuation to $9.2 billion, shows what startups can do if they’re innovating in the right sector of payments, experts say. Just six years old, Stripe provides tools for payments online …
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30 November
MasterCard Debuts Fraud-Prevention Technology and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Credit cards were implicated in 59% of all fraudulent online transactions for the period stretching from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, up from 49% for the same period last year and from 44% in 2014, according to data from iovation, a device-authentication company. Still, fraudulent traffic overall for the period …
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29 November
Chip Cards Dominate Holiday Shopping So Far, While E-Commerce Gains Spending Share
By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews U.S. shoppers flooded into stores and online this past weekend—Macy’s Web site crashed on Black Friday from the crush—to find holiday gift deals, with many putting their chip cards to use, though e-commerce spending, where the fraud-prevention feature of the chip is immaterial, continues to increase. In …
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29 November
Affirm Adds Four Integrations and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will resell the Zelle person-to-person payments service to its financial-institution clients under a new agreement with Zelle’s owner, Early Warning Services LLC. • Affirm Inc., whose technology allows consumers to pay over time for online purchases, said it is now integrated with four new e-commerce …
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29 November
First Data Is Becoming an ‘Increasingly Competitive’ Processor, Report Says
By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Can First Data Corp. shake its reputation as the aircraft carrier of the payments industry, a behemoth processor that is anything but nimble? It can, according to a new report from a securities firm. “First Data becoming increasingly competitive,” says the headline in the report by Chicago-based …
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28 November
Momentum Grows for Blockchain As Its Bitcoin Wallet Breaches the 10-Million Mark
By John Stewart@DTPaymentNews Buoyed by seismic political and financial events, the Bitcoin digital currency is picking up momentum in both its value and its adoption. Blockchain, a U.K. company that offers Bitcoin services, last week celebrated having issued 10 million wallets since its founding in 2011. That’s a doubling in …
