January retail sales, excluding automotive, were up 8.8% over January 2022, Mastercard Inc. said in its latest SpendingPulse report. Restaurant spending, in particular, was high at 24.2% more sales year-over-year. Spending on Bank of America Corp. credit and debit cards increased 5.1% year-over-year in January in a sign the bank interprets as “signs of …

Mastercard Inc. is teaming with videogame-commerce company Xsolla in an effort to smooth online-gaming checkouts by enabling new payment options for Xsolla’s videogame platform, the card network said. Mastercard cardholders will be able pay for gaming purchasing using credit card loyalty points from participating merchants and issuers. They can also …

Bank of America Corp. said the 608 patents it received in 2022 was a record number and was 19% more than in 2021, with grants covering areas such as mobile banking and payments, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other technologies. Kasheesh, a digital payments platform than enables consumers to split payments …

A bill designed to allow merchants to have a choice of networks for routing credit card transactions failed to pass last year, but now international tensions could affect the proposed law’s prospects in the new Congress. The bill, called the Credit Card Competition Act, would mandate that merchants have a …

Cost surprises at checkout are the leading cause of cart abandonment, with 57% of consumers saying they walked away from checkout at least once in the past year because of unexpected delivery costs, according to a wide-ranging shopping report released by point-of-sale technology provider Verifone Inc., which surveyed 995 respondents globally. Price …

The Merchants Payments Coalition released a letter it sent to the House Financial Services Committee arguing the Credit Card Competition Act should be enacted to block what the merchant-advocacy group calls a “national security threat” from China UnionPay, a China-based credit card network. The House committee has scheduled a hearing for this morning on “Combatting the …

With sports betting and casino gambling steadily gaining prominence as a payments market, payment processors are increasingly jumping on the opportunities the market presents. In the latest development, gaming-payments specialist Sightline Payments said it will offer its Play+ card, which has attracted 1.5 million users so far, as a Visa-branded …

Merchant satisfaction with payment processors has dwindled in the past year, as sellers cope with the impact of inflation on their processing costs as well as on their business in general, according to J.D. Power’s 2023 U.S. Merchant Services Satisfaction Study. The merchant satisfaction score for merchant-services providers totaled 853, …

Citizens Financial Group Inc. has launched the Zelle peer-to-peer payments service for the bank’s small-business customers. U.S.-based Clickatell said it has deployed its Chat 2 Pay service with a pay-by-link capability for FlySafair, a South African airline for mobile payments via’s FlySafair’s WhatsApp channel. Payments provider Lightspeed Commerce Inc. announced it processed $22.4 billion in volume for …

Point-of-sale technology provider Ingenico is working with buy now, pay later specialist Splitit to offer BNPL at the physical checkout using Ingenico’s payments-platform-as-a-service technology. Block Inc.’s Afterpay buy now, pay later service said it will enable access for users to New York Fashion Week beginning Feb. 11 and running for four days. Afterpay is …