Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By John Stewart Payments-processing titan First Data Corp. on Thursday launched its long-awaited effort to go public with an initial offering of stock that would value the company at as much as $17.6 billion and raise as much as $3.2 billion. The IPO could well be the largest seen on …
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To Trap a Thief
An old Paul Newman movie features a government official leaving his office for a moment. His visitor finds on his cluttered desk some confidential information, intended for her eyes. The official has arranged it so he cannot be convicted of handing over any secrets, even though he has. In today’s …
Read More »Aggregation Forever
Even though mobile wallets appear to be the better bet, card consolidators Coin, Swyp, and Stratos are sticking to their plans. Thumbing through a wallet trying to find the right payment card or loyalty card to rack up points at the cash register is an age-old experience for many …
Read More »Dropped Call
The mobile carriers once stood bestride the payments world as major players. Now, not so much. What happened, and can they stage a comeback? Not so long ago, the mobile network operators, or MNOs for short, cast a long shadow over the nascent business of mobile payments. While banks and …
Read More »CurrentC’s Pilot Is Under Way, But Users—And Some Clerks—Are in the Dark
By John Stewart At least some consumers in Columbus, Ohio, are using the Merchant Customer Exchange’s CurrentC mobile-payments app, but with little or no advertising so far finding a store cashier who knows about the app and how it works is a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s the finding of a CurrentC …
Read More »When “Free, Unlimited, Forever” Turns out To Have Limits, After All
By John Stewart While some startup transaction processors have capitalized lately on the idea of so-called free processing, at least one has now decided to backtrack on that concept. BitPay Inc., an Atlanta-based processor of Bitcoin transactions for merchants, announced Wednesday it is scrapping a plan it introduced only 14 …
Read More »How Google Wallet’s New P2P Focus Could Rescue the App From a Mediocre Legacy
The latest version of Google Wallet tended to get lost in all the hoopla surrounding Google Inc.’s launch two weeks ago of its Android Pay mobile-payments service, but while Wallet now has more modest ambitions, it could prove to be a potent force in the rapidly growing person-to-person payments business. …
Read More »With Its Spree Commerce Buy, First Data Aims To Bolster Its Online Tech Foundations
Payment processor First Data Corp. has acquired Spree Commerce, a provider of open-source software for 45,000 e-commerce storefronts. The addition of Bethesda, Md.-based Spree could bolster First Data as it competes with processors and tech providers for more business in the fast-growing world of online retailing. “Spree is at the …
Read More »As Criminals Redouble Their Efforts, Merchants Sustain an Eye-Popping Jump in Fraud
Merchants contend with fraud all the time, but the 2015 edition of the LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud study has found that their fraud costs are tallying 1.32% of revenue in 2015, a whopping 94% increase from the 0.68% rate in 2014. All categories of merchants in the LexisNexis Risk …
Read More »Card Aggregator Stratos Enlists Eastern Bank in Test
Stratos Inc., developer of the Stratos card that consolidates multiple credit and debit cards into one device consumers carry in their wallets, says Boston-based Eastern Bank will test its partner program. Card aggregators, like Stratos, operate on the premise that U.S. consumers want an easier way to manage all of …
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