On Tuesday, Plaid Inc., a bellwether of the open-banking movement, announced the availability of Plaid Portal US, a privacy tool for consumers using Plaid’s technology. The move comes as firms that connect financial-services providers with consumer-account data seek to help account owners manage how their information is distributed and used by …
Read More »Venmo Adds a Gift-Wrap Feature for Users Sending Money on Special Occasions
Peer-to-peer money transfers have become a hyper-competitive market, driving even the best-known providers to seek out an edge. One such idea is to introduce a feature that lets senders add virtual gift-wrapping to payments they’re sending for special occasions, and on Thursday Venmo started rolling out just such a feature. …
Read More »82% of SMBs Anticipate Accepting Digital Payment and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 1/12/22
Visa Inc.’s Back to Business study found 82% of small businesses plan to accept some form of digital payment in 2022, with 24% saying they plan to accept digital currencies like Bitcoin. The study canvassed 2,250 small-business owners and employees in nine countries, including the United States.Payments provider Lightspeed Commerce Inc. said its merchants …
Read More »Eye on Crypto: CSI Ushers Community Banks Into Bitcoin; MoneyGram Invests in Coinme
Dismissed until recently by many in the payments industry as a fantasy, cryptocurrency as a payments medium continues to step toward center stage. Early Thursday, transaction processor Computer Services Inc. said it will work with NYDIG to help community banks support their customers who want to buy, sell, or hold …
Read More »How the ACH May Have Been the Winner of the Pandemic Payments Sweepstakes
The share of payments claimed by the automated clearing house rose faster in 2020 than the share for cards, while checks dropped markedly. All the while, the share of payments claimed by cards, which had been steadily on the rise for years, flattened out. And while contactless transactions did rise …
Read More »The CHUCK Network’s Focus: Create A Better P2P Experience, Not Compete With Zelle
Rather than compete directly with Zelle and other peer-to-peer payment networks, the recently launched CHUCK network plans to position itself as a P2P network that eases money transfers for users, officials say. One such feature in the works is the ability for users to create a directory of destinations to allow …
Read More »Colony Bankcorp Launches Merchant-Acquiring Division and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 12/23/21
Colony Bankcorp Inc. announced it has launched a merchant-acquiring division led by Steve Raines as director for merchant services. Raines most recently was director at Synovus Merchant Services.Laurentian Bank of Canada said it will work with the card-issuing platform Brim Financial to issue Visa products in 2022, with features including instant virtual …
Read More »Community Banks Launch Chuck, Their Own Peer-to-Peer Payments Network
A new competitor in the peer-to-peer payments landscape emerged Wednesday with the introduction of CHUCK, an open-loop P2P network founded by 10 community banks. The new network uses technology from digital payments platform provider Payrailz that enables customers of any of the member banks to send money to a debit card …
Read More »Waitr Plans Cova Acquisition and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 12/17/21
Food-ordering and delivery provider Waitr Holdings Inc. said it has entered into a non-binding letter of intent to acquire Retail Innovation Labs Inc., known as Cova, a provider of point-of-sale software for cannabis dispensaries. The deal calls for a price of $90 million in cash and stock.Agilysys Inc., a provider of payments …
Read More »BofA Introduces a Zelle Widget to Help Veil Account Details for P2P Transfers
To make it more convenient for its customers to send money using Zelle, the major peer-to-peer payment network operated by Early Warning Services LLC, Bank of America Corp. has developed a Zelle widget that can be added on the home screen of a mobile device. The widget will take BofA …
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