Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
When JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced its own mobile wallet, Chase Pay, in October, it said the new payments service would begin rolling out by the middle of this year, and on Tuesday the money-center bank announced an important step in that direction. The fledgling service, which is up against …
Read More »MasterCard And Visa Jockey To Cash in on Expected Jump in Payments on Wearables
Payments made via so-called wearables are forecast to soar in the years to come, so Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are positioning themselves to cash in with announcements made Monday at the huge Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. MasterCard unveiled a partnership with WiseKey, a Swiss company whose security …
Read More »MasterCard Adding Location Tech As Part of Trend Toward User-Based Card Controls
With an eye to giving credit and debit card holders a measure of greater control, MasterCard Inc. unveiled a new alert feature that provides issuers with verifiable data about a cardholder’s location. That can help prevent authorization refusals, for example, when the cardholder travels. Available now in the United Kingdom, and …
Read More »Competition And Pricing Could Have Been Culprits in Flint Mobile’s Apparent Demise
Flint Mobile Inc., a startup whose app allowed merchants to process transactions by using their smart-phone camera to scan customers’ card numbers, abruptly ceased operations earlier this month and has arranged for merchants to switch over to Stripe for processing. That’s according to MerchantMaverick.com, a merchant-processing review site Flint, which …
Read More »With Its Payroll Service, Square Seeks Cross-Sell Avenues to New, Larger Merchants
Square Inc. introduced its payroll service for small businesses last June in California, and in the eight months since then Square Payroll has proven to be popular enough that the company added two more states in November and on Wednesday said it is expanding into five more. But while Square …
Read More »The PCI Council Plans an Early Release of Its Updated Data-Security Standard
The PCI Securities Standards Council said Wednesday that the next iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard will be coming in the first half of this year, probably in March or April, about six months earlier than called for in the current update cycle. The new version, dubbed PCI …
Read More »Security Questions Arise as Biometrics Gain Ground in Authentication
With biometric authentication now enabled in millions of smart phones and the focus of intense technological development, some payments experts are warning that biometric data can, just like old-fashioned passwords, be stolen, potentially leading to big problems for consumers and payment-service providers. “Biometrics are sure to proliferate in the next …
Read More »Eye on EMV: Merchant Adoption Shortfall; Visa Chip Card Tally Tops 212 Million
Patience, it seems, will be the watchword when it comes to merchant adoption of EMV chip card technology, while the number of cards issued bearing a chip continues to grow. A new report from The Strawhecker Group, a payments consultancy, finds that 37% of U.S. merchant locations are EMV-ready, falling …
Read More »Can PAR Keep Tokens Out of the Payments Sand Trap?
A new data element is getting a lot of discussion in merchant-acquiring and mobile-payments circles. It’s the so-called Payment Account Reference, or PAR, and it’s meant to associate all the payment tokens linked to a single credit or debit card primary account number, or PAN. But implementing PAR could be …
Read More »Visa’s Real Square Stake
Editor’s note: Read the latest by clicking here. A spate of media reports that Visa Inc. owns nearly 10% of Square Inc. are wrong and are based on a misreading of a filing Visa made Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a person familiar with the matter …
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