Venture funding for payments companies may have slowed dramatically in recent months, but that’s not the case across the board. Bitcoin and blockchain startups in particular uncorked a geyser of cash in the first quarter, with dollars invested totaling $173 million on 39 deals, according to data released this week …

Members of Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime membership service are enthusiastic users of the e-retail giant’s payments service, which it makes available to other merchants. In fact, some 50% of Amazon Pay’s users belong to Prime, according to Amazon Pay vice president Patrick Gauthier, who spoke with Digital Transactions News Tuesday at …

• Fitness-band vendor Fitbit Inc. has acquired the wearable-payments assets of Coin in a deal that closed May 12 and includes relevant personnel and intellectual property. Terms were not disclosed. Coin, which was part of a wearable-payments initiative announced earlier this year by MasterCard Inc., is best-known for a device that …

• Visa Inc. announced its Visa Checkout digital wallet now has more than 12 million consumer accounts and is offered by more than 675 financial institutions in 16 countries. “Hundreds of thousands” of merchants now use the platform, Visa said, making Checkout one of the fastest-growing consumer products in the …

• WePay Inc. introduced a service that allows business-services platforms to offer card readers under their own brand to merchants for mobile acceptance of mag-stripe and EMV chip cards. Standard processing rate is 2.75% plus 30 cents. The first platforms to take advantage of the service are FreshBooks and Infusionsoft. …

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., made his name in the payments business with an amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that put a cap on the debit card interchange big banks can earn. Now, he’s investigating the nation’s rocky EMV rollout with separate inquiries concerning snarled certification queues and the …

Payments startup Payzing Inc. is banking that a digital-currency integration with Uphold, a virtual funds and commodity platform, will lead to e-commerce success. San Francisco-based Payzing uses Uphold’s blockchain technology to offer online merchants an alternate payment method to traditional credit and debit cards. Consumers use their Uphold accounts to …

    By John Shlonsky, Senior Executive Vice President  & President, Merchant Services, TSYS In today’s dynamic payments environment, there are two vital components needed for ongoing growth. First, bring relevant products and services to the market. Then, provide operational excellence and support to the customers who use them. A …

For all the talk about independent software vendors and value-added resellers as an alternative channel for acquirers to sign up new merchants, the ISV/VAR share of the market is actually quite small, according to research released last week by Annapolis, Md.-based First Annapolis Consulting. The research does indicate, however, that …