Smart Cards

Departing PayPal Holdings Inc. chief operating officer Bill Ready in January will assume the role of head of commerce at Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit, TechCrunch reported. PayPal announced in June that he would leave the company at year’s end. Ready came to PayPal in 2013 as a result of the company’s $800-million …

The New York City area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Wednesday activated 96 contactless card readers in Manhattan’s Penn Station, one of the nation’s busiest transit hubs, in its quest to accept contactless payment cards and mobile-payment apps across its vast subway and bus system by the end of next year. …

Customer data from 4 million payment cards stolen in breaches at four restaurant chains has gone up for sale in the Joker’s Stash underground bazaar, KrebsOnSecurity reported. The breaches occurred at nearly half the 1,750 total locations of Krystal, Moe’s Southwest Grill, McAlister’s Deli and Schlotzsky’s, the latter three of which are owned by …

Twenty European banks are working on setting up a pan-European payment system to challenge Visa, Mastercard and technology companies such as Google and PayPal, according to press reports. The project is code-named PEPSI, for Pan European Payment System Initiative.In a development that signals an opening in China’s long-protected payments environment, Chinese mobile-payment giants …

The bank card networks lengthened their 2019 streak of merger-and-acquisition activity on Tuesday with Mastercard Inc. announcing it has a deal to acquire marketing software developer SessionM and Visa Inc. reporting it completed its acquisition of Rambus Inc.’s token services and ticketing businesses. Mastercard said the addition of SessionM will enhance …

With card-based transit payments picking up steam in the United States, a key Mastercard Inc. executive said Thursday that 22% of the network’s physical-world transactions globally were contactless as of the end of 2018. The time to complete a contactless transaction is down to 0.4 seconds, added Ajay Bhalla, president …

United Merchant Services Inc. said it acquired the rights to Royal Western Computer’s assets, including its point-of-sale software for dry cleaning merchants, branding, trademarks, licensee database, and sales channels. Royal Western Computer holds more than 25% of the dry cleaning POS market, UMS said. The company intends to expand by combining …

U.S. merchants added 600,000 locations for EMV chip card acceptance in 2019’s first six months, and Visa issuers cranked out an additional 10 million EMV payment cards, according to new figures from Visa Inc. In its latest update on the U.S. conversion from magnetic-stripe payment cards to the EMV chip …

Apple Inc.’s new Apple Card is an unconventional animal with what some observers call ho-hum rewards, but separate studies released Wednesday show the card nonetheless could make a big splash. Research firm J.D. Power said its late June survey found “awareness is already remarkably high” for a product that offers …

Dual-interface credit and debit card sales lifted CPI Card Group Inc.’s second-quarter sales figure, the company reported Wednesday. As the nation’s issuers increase their orders for the near-field communications-equipped chip cards—the cards can be dipped into a point-of-sale terminal or tapped against compatible devices to do a transaction—Littleton, Colo.-based CPI …