Transaction Processing

For years, the wave of fraud receded like an outgoing tide for companies that accepted electronic payments from consumers and other businesses. But last year, a tidal wave crashed on shore. Fully 73% of companies reported they had suffered actual or attempted payments fraud in 2015, up 11 percentage points …

• The Federal Reserve picked consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to support its Faster Payments Task Force efforts this year by assessing solution proposals from various payments providers. • Merchant processor Square Inc. announced its “Build With Square,” a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrates point-of-sale and-online payments capabilities with …

EMVCo, the chip card standards body owned by the world’s largest payment card networks, on Tuesday formally updated its tokenization specification to include the new Payment Account Reference data element. The purpose of PAR is to match tokens to the underlying primary account number of a credit or debit card …

There’s no turning back from the mobile phenomenon for financial transactions as a new survey finds that 41% of consumers use their smart phones to make bank transactions, such as person-to-person payments, paying bills, and making check deposits, up from 36% in 2014, says consultancy Mercator Advisory Group Inc. While …

With President Obama in the midst of a historic trip to Cuba Monday, payments companies ranging from Stripe to PayPal to Western Union are eyeing new transaction growth as relations thaw between the U.S. and the island nation just 105 miles from Florida. Online payments provider Stripe Inc. announced that …

Two mobile point-of-sale system providers are doing their part in the proliferation of such systems with the release of Click a Waiter Inc.’s white-label POS system and Aspex LLC’s deal with Frontier Airlines to provide an onboard POS system. Leominster, Mass.-based Click a Waiter Tuesday released a white-label version of …

First Data Corp. recently closed one office in Florida and plans to close a bigger one in New York next year, but the company still added 1,000 employees to its worldwide head count last year. Newsday, the newspaper of Long Island, N.Y., reported Tuesday that First Data filed a report …

  Most businesses thrive on referrals from existing clients, but acquirers and independent sales organizations get a surprisingly paltry number of referrals from the merchants they process for. In fact, fewer than 1% of merchants refer other merchants to their transaction servicer, even in the face of rewards such as …

• Dissident shareholder Harvest Capital Strategies LLC, owner of 7.8% of prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp., nominated three director candidates for election at Green Dot’s upcoming annual shareholder meeting. Green Dot issued a statement saying it had recently offered Harvest Capital the opportunity to appoint one director immediately and …

• Merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc. announced an integration of its Portico Gateway with Computop Paygate in an arrangement that will give Heartland merchants access to international payments. Heartland is set to be acquired this spring by Global Payments Inc. in a $4.3 billion cash-and-stock deal announced in December. …