What will the payments business look like when, God willing, the coronavirus vaccine becomes available and the plague lifts? That’s one of the questions we’ve been batting around here at Digital Transactions, so in this issue we decided to take a shot at answering it. The results can be found …

Citing the risk to their businesses from the coronavirus pandemic, securities rating agency Fitch Ratings revised its outlook to negative for seven publicly traded consumer-finance companies, including American Express Co., Discover Financial Services, and Synchrony Financial.Main Event Entertainment Inc. issued a notification indicating malware collected data from cards used on point-of-sale devices for food-and-beverage and entertainment …

The nation’s largest issuer of store cards sounded a note of optimism Tuesday as the Covid-19 crisis continued to ravage consumer spending. “Believe it or not, there are deals in the pipeline [with merchants],” said Margaret Keane, chief executive of Synchrony Financial. “We’re not sitting back. We’re highly engaged.” Keane …

Contactless payments already capture a big share of point-of-sale purchases in Canada, and that share is sure to grow with recent announcements by Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. that they are raising their contactless transaction limits to C$250 to limit the handling of cards that could spread the coronavirus, according …

Priority Technologies Holdings Inc. says that just like other merchant acquirers its payment volumes are taking a hit as consumers and businesses hunker down in reaction to the corona virus. But its chief executive insists Priority’s diversified business model provides insulation from the pandemic’s worst effects.  Overall processing volumes for …

Repay Holdings Corp. said its 2019 card payment volume of $10.7 billion was a 44% increase over the combined 2018 figures for its constituent units, the Atlanta-based processor reported Monday. Formed in mid-2019 through the merger of Hawk Parent Holdings LLC and a subsidiary of Thunder Bridge Acquisition Ltd., Repay …

Klarna Bank AB, a leading exemplar of the trend toward offering installment-plan payments online and at the point of sale, has received backing from Ant Financial Services Group in a deal that cements an existing alliance between the two companies and could add considerable propulsive force to Klarna’s relatively new …

The combination of the French payments colossi Worldline S.A. and Ingenico Group S.A. spans multiple adjacent, but historically distinct, markets across the payments value chain. Issuer processing has been an oligopoly of ponderous, industrial-strength scale players such as Worldline, FIS, Fiserv/First Data, Total Systems, SIA/SSB, Nets, and Evry/Tieto. The traditional …

2019 saw three of the biggest combinations in the history of the electronic payment business. The deals closed months ago. What happens now? Gotten over merger shock yet? Well, fasten your seat belt. The effects from last year’s trio of mega-combinations are likely to ripple through the payments industry for …

Worldline S.A.’s $8.6 billion bid to buy Ingenico Group S.A. would create a Gallic champion to take on America’s processing titans—Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS), Fiserv Inc., and Global Payments Inc.—all of which have significant European businesses, though none has made headway in the Continent’s second-largest payment market, France.  …