Fueled by such scams as business email compromise, phishing frauds are staging a dramatic comeback. The total number of attacks reached 266,387 in the third quarter, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a security-industry organization that tracks the crime. That’s the highest level of phishing activity …

Twenty European banks are working on setting up a pan-European payment system to challenge Visa, Mastercard and technology companies such as Google and PayPal, according to press reports. The project is code-named PEPSI, for Pan European Payment System Initiative.In a development that signals an opening in China’s long-protected payments environment, Chinese mobile-payment giants …

On the one hand, fraud losses continue a seemingly inexorable rise. On the other, there are positive steps businesses can take to mitigate those losses. Earlier this year, the AFP (the Association for Financial Professionals) published its annual “Payments Fraud and Control Survey,” which looks at trends in business-payments fraud …

What’s keeping you up at night? If you said nothing, you’re lucky. Here’s a list of the biggest issues troubling most payments executives today. We live in a world full of tribulation and turbulence, and the payments business is no exception. Herewith, we offer our annual catalog of the 10 …

While much attention in the payments industry in recent months has focused on EMVCo’s Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) specification, another e-commerce spec from the standards body could be receiving some tweaks. These possible initiatives, which concern the EMV 3-D Secure specifications, include a way of adding users’ travel data to …

PayPal Holdings Inc. and Synchrony Financial have been sparing about the details of a new credit card they plan to issue for PayPal’s Venmo peer-to-peer payment service, but on Monday a top Synchrony executive said the partners are counting on a key characteristic of Venmo to help market the new card. …

Days after Nxgen and Payscape announced they were merging with a third payments provider, BluePay Canada, the new entity said it has agreed to combine with a fourth company, Payroc LLC, and adopt the Payroc name. James Oberman, Payroc’s chief executive, will serve as CEO of the merged entity.Discover Financial Services said it now …

Kabbage Inc. launched Kabbage Payments, a payments service for small businesses. Kabbage provides merchant lending and uses a payment-facilitator model for the Kabbage Payments subsidiary.American Express Co. revamped its 50-year-old Green Card with a new suite of benefits and rewards. Now called Green from Amex, the card’s fee is $150, up from …

Discover Network announced a holiday promotion running through December that offers discounts and other promotions to cardholders who shop at Amazon.com and at some Amazon physical stores.Payments provider AvidXchange launched its AvidPay and AvidInvoice services for the long-term health-care and social-service industries. The services automate accounts-payable and payments processes.Data-security specialist KnowBe4 released its list of …

Galileo Financial Technologies, a 19-year-old developer of application programming interfaces for payments, announced a $77 million institutional funding round led by venture-capital firm Accel.Flowhub Holdings Inc., provider of a management platform for cannabis retailers, announced a Series A funding round whose participants included Iqram Magdon-Ismail, the co-founder and former CEO …