News

August, 2014

• 14 August

  Change Is Coming for Agents as Merchants’ Payment Products Evolve

    Sales agents as a way to sell payment-processing services to merchants aren’t going away, but they aren’t staying the same. That’s according to a new research report from Double Diamond Group LLC, a Centennial, Colo.-based payments-advisory firm. “This is a period of significant change in acquiring,” says Rick Oglesby, …
• 13 August

  Dubbed Local Register, Amazon’s Mobile POS Service Arrives

    Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. is moving into brick-and-mortar stores with the debut Wednesday of its Local Register mobile point-of-sale service. Similar to other mobile POS services, such as Square Inc.’s, Local Register requires merchants to create an account, purchase a card reader and download an app to a …
• 12 August

  FinCen Director Defends Marijuana Guidelines as Bank Group Urges Congress To Act

  Defending the federal government’s guidance for providing financial services to legal marijuana businesses, a senior U.S. Treasury Department official on Tuesday said more than 100 banks and credit unions are now working with cannabis-industry customers. One consultant who connects banks with marijuana merchants confirms that financial-institution interest in the budding …
• 12 August

  FleetCor Buying Comdata; Gift Card Business May Be On the Block

    FleetCor Technologies Inc. is buying payment processor Comdata Inc. for $3.45 billion, Norcross, Ga.-based FleetCor announced Tuesday. The deal gets FleetCor access to four businesses it is not already in, including over-the-road fleet payment services, fuel cards for national accounts, virtual payments and gift cards via Comdata’s Stored Value …
• 11 August

  The CFPB Warns About the ‘Wild West’ of Virtual Currencies

  Already eyed with suspicion by various arms of the federal government and states, virtual currencies now are the subject of a warning issued Monday by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB released a six-page advisory about the risks consumers face when using new forms of electronic money. “Virtual …
• 7 August

  Future U.S. EMV Card Shipments Could Garner A Larger Share: Report

    Shipments of smart cards capable of payments that adhere to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) standard are expected to be six times greater in 2014 than in 2013 in the United States, says a new report from ABI Research. That total, forecast to be 154 million this year, is not a …
• 7 August

  Eye on Security: Visa Pumps Up Gas-Station Analytics; PCI Council Issues Guidance on Third Parties

  Visa Inc. on Thursday announced a new network service to flag high-risk transactions at fuel pumps, and the PCI Security Standards Council published guidance to help merchants and other organizations that handle payment card data manage their relationships with third parties to whom their outsource data-security tasks. n Visa calls …
• 6 August

  COMMENTARY: Chip, Signature, And Square—Perfect Together

  Rather than jumping to conclusions about the implications of Square Inc.’s decision last week to implement a Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card solution that forgoes PINs and instead relies on a signature at the point of sale, it’s important to first ask the question: Why would a payments disruptor and tech …
• 6 August

  Type of Merchant, Customer Base Dictate Which Merchants Should Act First on EMV

  With a major deadline arriving in October 2015, U.S. payments players are expected to be busy in the coming months converting systems to be compliant with the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard. But with liability for counterfeit card fraud shifting in 14 months to the party not prepared for EMV, how …
• 5 August

  Payments Companies Push ISVs And VARs To Move Fast To Sell Mobile Tech to Merchants

  Stressing such factors as the rapid growth of mobile commerce and the advantages of streamlined integration, representatives from Discover Financial Services, Mercury Payment Systems LLC, and PayPal Inc. on Tuesday urged a roomful of point-of-sale technology resellers to begin moving quickly on selling mobile payments to retail clients. “I would …