Mobile-authentication technology provider Payfone Inc. raised $24 million in a funding round led by credit-reporting agency TransUnion with participation from previous investor Synchrony Financial and two institutional investors. TransUnion said it will integrate Payfone’s Trust Platform and Trust Score with its identity products, and become Payfone’s primary partner for regulated …

The Zelle person-to-person payments service continues to boom for one of its biggest participants, Bank of America Corp., where transaction volume more than doubled in the first quarter. BofA reported Tuesday that its customers sent or received 58.1 million Zelle transactions via email addresses or mobile-phone numbers, up 103% from …

EBay Inc. announced Monday that its managed-payments platform, introduced in September, has now added PayPal on top of Google Pay, Apple Pay, and credit, debit, and gift cards. A report Wednesday, however, indicates PayPal availability is limited. A startup called Obligo said it is enabling renters to make so-called move-in …

Nxt-ID Inc. is getting closer to spinning off its Fit Pay Inc. unit, which markets the contactless-payment technology behind Garmin Pay and Swatch Pay and also this week began shipping a contactless device to allow consumers to spend their Bitcoin holdings at stores. The spin-off, first announced in September, will …

FitPay Inc. has started shipping its contactless, coin-shaped Flip device, which allows users to spend Bitcoin as U.S. dollars at stores. The company said on Wednesday it plans to “ramp up” production of Flip though the first half of the year. The news comes after Fit Pay announced in January …

Apple Inc.’s forthcoming Apple Card is another push from the computing giant to move payments into a digital realm under Apple’s control, according to analysts. Apple last week announced the card, which bears a Mastercard Inc. brand and will be issued by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The product, which eschews …

Huntington Bank launched the Zelle peer-to-peer payments service on its mobile and online banking service. Payment Data Systems Inc. said its FiCentive subsidiary will provide its Akimbo commercial prepaid Mastercard-branded cards to the Bowen Center, a behavioral-health company. Zapt, an on-demand platform that lets customers schedule household moves, said it …

Payment complexity, combined with a scarcity of engineering talent, makes a new functionality layer all the more urgent for merchants’ payment flows. “Orchestration” refers to software platforms and services that automate … business processes to help streamline and simplify operations management. By automating the configuration, management, and interoperability of disparate …

Other commercial companies have failed in their efforts to establish an industrial loan corporation, a form of bank, but much to banks’ distress, Square Inc. very well could prove to be the exception. “Fighting the ILC designation is a good way for the banks to slow a dangerous competitor, but …

This one wasn’t hard to predict. Observers said Fiserv Inc.’s $22 billion bid for mega-processor First Data Corp. in January would trigger a wave of mergers in the payments industry—and sure enough, along came Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on March 18 with a $43-billion cash-and-stock deal to acquire …