News

February, 2016

• 23 February

  Chase Pay Takes First Important Stride Forward With a Deal for Acceptance at 7,500 Starbucks Stores

  When JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced its own mobile wallet, Chase Pay, in October, it said the new payments service would begin rolling out by the middle of this year, and on Tuesday the money-center bank announced an important step in that direction. The fledgling service, which is up against …
• 22 February

  MasterCard And Visa Jockey To Cash in on Expected Jump in Payments on Wearables

  Payments made via so-called wearables are forecast to soar in the years to come, so Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are positioning themselves to cash in with announcements made Monday at the huge Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. MasterCard unveiled a partnership with WiseKey, a Swiss company whose security …
• 22 February

  Tennessee Fee-Disclosure Law Forces Non-Bank Processors To Pull Out the Calculators

  A new Tennessee law governing merchants’ payment card contracts could create headaches for non-bank entities such as independent sales organizations and payment facilitators, merchant-acquiring industry sources say. The law will require processors on a monthly basis to list all fees assessed since the last statement. That’s certainly not unusual in …
• 22 February

  Thompson Investments Steps in to Acquire Troubled Powa Technologies

  Powa Technologies Ltd., the troubled startup behind PowaTag and the PowaPOS line of mobile point-of-sale gear, is being acquired by Thompson Investments, according to a terse announcement released late Friday. No terms were released. Before Thompson stepped in, London-based Powa Technologies had been reported to be close to appointing management consultancy …
• 19 February

  MasterCard Adding Location Tech As Part of Trend Toward User-Based Card Controls

  With an eye to giving credit and debit card holders a measure of greater control, MasterCard Inc. unveiled a new alert feature that provides issuers with verifiable data about a cardholder’s location. That can help prevent authorization refusals, for example, when the cardholder travels. Available now in the United Kingdom, and …
• 19 February

  Competition And Pricing Could Have Been Culprits in Flint Mobile’s Apparent Demise

  Flint Mobile Inc., a startup whose app allowed merchants to process transactions by using their smart-phone camera to scan customers’ card numbers, abruptly ceased operations earlier this month and has arranged for merchants to switch over to Stripe for processing. That’s according to MerchantMaverick.com, a merchant-processing review site Flint, which …
• 18 February

  With Its Payroll Service, Square Seeks Cross-Sell Avenues to New, Larger Merchants

  Square Inc. introduced its payroll service for small businesses last June in California, and in the eight months since then Square Payroll has proven to be popular enough that the company added two more states in November and on Wednesday said it is expanding into five more. But while Square …
• 18 February

  M-Commerce Logged a Banner Fourth Quarter, With Smart Phones Outpacing Tablets

  U.S. consumers apparently held onto and used their smart phones and tablets even more than one might suspect given the increase in mobile-commerce transactions during the fourth quarter of 2015, reports Criteo, a New York City-based online marketing specialist. In its “State of Mobile Commerce Report,” released Wednesday, Criteo said …
• 18 February

  The PCI Council Plans an Early Release of Its Updated Data-Security Standard

  The PCI Securities Standards Council said Wednesday that the next iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard will be coming in the first half of this year, probably in March or April, about six months earlier than called for in the current update cycle. The new version, dubbed PCI …
• 17 February

  Security Questions Arise as Biometrics Gain Ground in Authentication

  With biometric authentication now enabled in millions of smart phones and the focus of intense technological development, some payments experts are warning that biometric data can, just like old-fashioned passwords, be stolen, potentially leading to big problems for consumers and payment-service providers. “Biometrics are sure to proliferate in the next …