Transaction Processing

PayPal Holdings Inc. said it is buying Simility, a fraud-prevention and risk-management platform, for $120 million. Once the deal closes—expected in the third quarter—PayPal merchants will get access to Simility’s fraud tools, the company said. This is PayPal’s second acquisition announced this week. Wednesday PayPal said it was buying Hyperwallet for …

Canadian fintech Mobeewave could see its contactless-payment service for Samsung smart phones expand thanks to a new agreement with National Bank of Canada. And this week a British financial trade group announced that contactless payments in the United Kingdom jumped 97% in 2017. Dubbed National Bank Easy Pay, the service …

The mobile point-of-sale revolution is picking up momentum, despite having started nearly a decade ago with the first attachable card-reading devices for mobile phones. Projections from United Kingdom-based Juniper Research released this week indicate the installed base of mobile point-of-sale devices of all kinds worldwide—including integrated technology from major vendors—will …

PayPal Holdings Inc. blocked sales of the violent video game Active Shooter, which lets players choose the role of a gunman terrorizing a school or of a SWAT team trying to stop him, the Associated Press reported; the game had been pulled from the online marketplace Steam after complaints but …

Zelle’s gestation as a favored person-to-person payments service may be nearing fulfillment. A new survey from LendEDU finds that, nine months after its June 2017 debut, more consumers had become aware of the bank-backed service. In 2017, only 6.1% had heard of Zelle. By the time of the survey, that …

Its pending $2.2 billion acquisition of Sweden’s iZettle still awaits final approval, but that didn’t stop PayPal Holdings Inc. from announcing late Tuesday that it has a deal to buy payout provider Hyperwallet for $400 million in cash. San Francisco-based Hyperwallet is an international specialist in provisioning payments, commissions, and …

Adyen touts its omnichannel approach. It has integrated e-commerce with in-store sales, for example, at hip men’s clothier Bonobos. The Dutch processor’s growth locomotive, however, is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, e-commerce. While not enjoying Mastercard’s network power, Adyen has built platform economics by credentialing and securely integrating …

Merchant processor Paysafe North America said that by mid-July it will start offering same-day settlement to small U.S. merchants. The service will be offered in collaboration with Company.com, a services platform for small businesses, and Ingo Money, a push-payments provider. Visa Inc.’s 10-hour service interruption in Europe on June 1 …

The fraud-fighting tools of the future for e-commerce retailers include artificial intelligence, multimerchant velocity checks, and fingerprint identification, according to a poll of 166 merchants for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. None of those newer tools is in widespread use today, but more merchants plan to use them going …

Dutch payments processor Adyen N.V. is in the limelight just as the payments business has gotten hot. Ant Financial just raised the biggest private funding round ever—$14 billion at a $150 billion valuation, in part on the back of its Alipay unit. These are new and nontraditional entrants. The old …