Transaction Processing

• In a study of more than 900,000 merchants, processor First Data Corp. says retail spending from Thanksgiving through CyberMonday (Nov. 28) grew 5.8% from year-earlier levels; brick-and-mortar retailers saw spending grow 4.1% while e-commerce spending jumped 14.3%. • European software firm Comtrade Digital Services has built an automated banking platform for the Viber messaging app, …

In a move that expands its business as a provider of risk-control services for merchants and card issuers, Visa Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to acquire e-commerce payment-authentication provider CardinalCommerce Corp. Founded in 1999, Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce’s signature product is Cardinal Secure Authentication, a service that uses …

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/dt/201612/

Retailers can expect a bump up in the dollars consumers load on closed-loop gift cards this holiday season as a festive spirit takes hold and more merchants favor the cards over holiday discounts, according to a forecast released last month by payments consultancy Mercator Advisory Group. “Retailers are expecting that …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Stripe Inc.’s latest funding round, in which the privately held San Francisco-based company nearly doubled its valuation to $9.2 billion, shows what startups can do if they’re innovating in the right sector of payments, experts say. Just six years old, Stripe provides tools for payments online …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews U.S. shoppers flooded into stores and online this past weekend—Macy’s Web site crashed on Black Friday from the crush—to find holiday gift deals, with many putting their chip cards to use, though e-commerce spending, where the fraud-prevention feature of the chip is immaterial, continues to increase. In …

• Processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will resell the Zelle person-to-person payments service to its financial-institution clients under a new agreement with Zelle’s owner, Early Warning Services LLC. • Affirm Inc., whose technology allows consumers to pay over time for online purchases, said it is now integrated with four new e-commerce …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews New York-based iPayment Holdings Inc. has named O.B. Rawls IV chief executive and president and charged the veteran payments executive with guiding the payments company’s plans to increase sales . Rawls, whose prior experience includes First Data Corp., also joins the iPayment board of directors. He has …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Perhaps when he’s not tweeting, President-elect Donald J. Trump will get around to reading the letter the Electronic Transactions Association sent to him Monday outlining payments-industry proposals for Congress and federal regulators once Trump’s administration takes over in January. “ETA encourages your administration to create a policy …

• The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued final approval of a $37.5 million settlement in a class-action case, Reyes v. Zions First National Bank, attorneys for the class announced. In the case, plaintiffs alleged Zions Bank and a former payment-processing subsidiary knowingly handled payments for fraudulent …