Person-to-Person Payments

Fraud, acquisitions, and interchange dominated the top 10 list of news articles posted to DigitalTransactions.net in 2018. Starting with a $6.2 billion pact between Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc., on one hand, and defendant banks, on the other, stemming from 13-year-old litigation over credit card interchange, to American Express Co.’s …

An affiliate of Elliott Management Corp., a hedge fund that is trying to acquire remote deposit capture software provider Mitek Systems Inc. through a portfolio company, plans to nominate seven director candidates at Mitek’s 2019 shareholder meeting, Mitek reported in a regulatory filing. The meeting date and location hasn’t been …

All but two of 27 bank mobile apps examined in a new S&P Global Inc. study offer person-to-person payments and another bank will soon add the feature to its app. But less than a third of the apps support cardless ATM transactions. The study by New York City-based S&P Global’s …

The Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with two defendants accused of laundering nearly $6 million in credit card charges through fraudulent merchant accounts. Lightspeed, developer of a cloud-based point-of-sale system, released Lightspeed Loyalty, a service that offers merchants a rewards program, automated marketing, customer data reporting, and, for restaurants, …

The prognostications for 2019 are starting to roll in, and if at least one comes true, we’ll see business-to-business transactions driving the growth of faster-payment systems. And smart phones might actually gain some discernible traction at the point of sale. The predictions come from the big accounting and consulting firm …

Thales’s proposed all-cash acquisition of rival Gemalto received merger-control regulatory clearance by the European Commission. Effective immediately, the clearance is conditioned on Thales’s agreement to divest its general-purpose hardware security modules business worldwide. The deal still must clear regulatory hurdles in five other countries, including the United States. Bluefin Payment …

Adoption and usage rates for the mobile wallets from Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. (Google), and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. have been far from stellar, but now evidence is emerging that Apple’s decision a year ago to ditch fingerprint identification on its newest smart phones in favor of facial-recognition technology could …

The surge in popularity for peer-to-peer payments is making itself felt in the realm of holiday gifting, helping to erode a longstanding cultural taboo against giving cash during the annual gift-giving season. Gift transactions rose 47.2% in December 2017 over the monthly average for the previous August through October, according …

First Data Corp. released its Holiday Insights dashboard, which shows real-time U.S. holiday spending trends, such as total spend percentage increase, today’s most active categories with average ticket and total transactions, and regional payment volume. To date, it indicates retail spending from Thanksgiving through Black Friday increased 6.4% year-over-year. Cardfree Inc., …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …