• Chip card standards body EMVCo reported that 42.4% of global general-purpose credit and debit card-present transactions from July 2015 to June 2016 involved an EMV chip card being read by an EMV-enabled point-of-sale terminal, up from 33% in the previous 12-month period. In the U.S., where the card networks’ POS EMV liability shifts took effect in October 2015, 7.2% of card-present transactions were EMV-enabled in the period, up from 0.26% in the prior 12 months.
• Sionic Mobile announced its ION Commerce Engine, which enables mobile rewards programs, has incorporated data analysis and dashboards driven by IBM Corp.’s Watson Analytics artificial-intelligence capability. Sionic’s ICE Engine integrates with payment terminals and point-of-sale systems.
• The NFC Forum, which manages technical specifications for near-field communication applications, announced a new release of its Certification Program and a white paper called “NFC-enabled e-Ticketing in Public Transport: Clearing the Route to Interoperability.”
• Payments company Net Element Inc. said its PayOnline subsidiary launched a payment-acceptance module for Telegram, a cloud-based instant-messenger application.
• Payments provider Payscout Inc. announced it will open a new office in Malta in coming weeks following its approval for a payment institution license to enable it to operate in the European Union.
• Acquirer Payvision released a report on cross-border e-commerce that found interest in it was flat, compared to 2015.
• Sygnifyd said it will incorporate in its machine-learning capability data from ThreatMetrix’s Digital Identity Network to authenticate orders for e-commerce merchants and reduce false declines.