While Facebook has gotten the lion’s share of attention for its attempt to launch a digital currency, the real future of digital-currency payments may lie with the nation’s largest retailer, Walmart Inc. Walmart, based in Bentonville, Ark., filed a patent application on Aug. 1 for a “system and method for …

Close observers of the payments business may have noticed lately that while Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have failed to live up to their promises, some pretty big and important players are nonetheless climbing on the blockchain bandwagon. Perhaps the most prominent of these arrivistes is, of course, Facebook. The social-media …

Expect more consumers to wield their smart phones for their holiday shopping this year. Fully 70% of consumers in the Deloitte 2019 Holiday Retail Survey plan to make a holiday purchase using a smart phone. That’s up from 67% in 2018 and from 59% in 2017. A separate Visa Inc. …

Customer data from 4 million payment cards stolen in breaches at four restaurant chains has gone up for sale in the Joker’s Stash underground bazaar, KrebsOnSecurity reported. The breaches occurred at nearly half the 1,750 total locations of Krystal, Moe’s Southwest Grill, McAlister’s Deli and Schlotzsky’s, the latter three of which are owned by …

Researchers and risk-control firms have been monitoring the increase in e-commerce fraud for years, and it’s hit home for a group of merchants surveyed by American Express Co. A newly released AmEx survey that included 400 business leaders says they estimate 27% of their firms’ annual online sales are fraudulent …

PayPal Holdings Inc. is betting big on its strategy of boosting its e-commerce presence with its approximately $4 billion acquisition of Honey Science Corp., a technology platform that helps consumers find offers and deals on popular e-commerce sites. Announced Wednesday afternoon, the deal envisions Honey tapping into the more than …

Newtek Business Services Corp., a provider of loans, merchant processing, and other services for small businesses, acquired a 51% stake in POS on Cloud, developer of payments and business-management systems for restaurants, retailers, assisted-living providers, and parks and golf courses.Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) said Eyefinity, a software developer for …

Chargebacks911, a dispute-mitigation and risk-management provider, said Santa Barbara, Calif., has the highest rate of fraudulent credit card chargebacks at 6.79%, followed by Paradise Valley, Ariz., 6.73%, and La Mirada, Calif., 6.68%. Other top 10 cites are listed in the company’s chargeback study, the second since 2014.Mobile-shopping and -payments app …

HSBC Bank USA N.A. has made a real-time payments service, via The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, available to its commercial and institutional clients. HSBC said these clients have been able to receive real-time payments since July and now can send them. HSBC expects to roll out the service to its consumer …

Confirming rumors that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into issues involving debit card transaction routing, Visa Inc. late last week reported the Federal Trade Commission has asked it to voluntarily provide information about its routing practices. In a brief notice in its fiscal 2019 report to the Securities and …