Now that FedNow is available, the real work begins. But will the new system compete or collaborate with existing real-time networks? FedNow, the real-time payments service from the Federal Reserve, launched with 35 participating institutions on July 20, almost 13 years after the Fed’s same-day automated clearing house settlement window …

Credit card interchange has come under assault, and not for the first time. Now, though, the stakes are higher than ever. The cleverly crafted “Credit Card Competition Act of 2023” from Sens. Durbin, Marshall, Welch, and Vance is the latest salvo in a forever war against payments-industry fees, including how …

Visa Inc. is touting recent changes to how chargebacks that could be first-party fraud, also known as friendly fraud, are processed as potentially saving small businesses globally $1 billion in costs over the next five years. Expectations are that the streamlined process will increase merchants’ ability to provide more accurate …

Citcon USA LLC, an e-commerce wallet-technology provider, is adding Block Inc.’s Cash App Pay and Afterpay buy now, pay later payment methods to its inventory of merchant options. In related news, Block’s Square point-of-sale unit is bolstering merchant selling tools with new online features. Citcon’s integration of Cash App Pay, …

ACI Worldwide Inc. said it will work with Microsoft Corp. to make its Real-Time Payments Cloud available in Microsoft Azure, enabling financial institutions access to The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC’s Real Time Payments network and the Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments service. Treasury Prime, an embedded-banking technology provider, said it …

Stripe Inc. early Monday launched a series of enhancements aimed at improving checkouts for merchants. The new features—which include one-click checkouts and a no-code A/B testing tool for businesses to evaluate how different payment methods perform—rely on pre-built user interfaces. This should allow merchants to quickly deploy the new features, …

Airlines Reporting Corp. announced it has started processing payments through its ARC Pay application programming interface for the online travel agency Business Travel Group LLC’s Business Class brand. The Western Union Co. announced it will offer free money transfers for funds consumers around the world send to Libya in the wake of severe …

GoTab Inc., a provider of digital ordering and payment solutions for the hospitality industry, has introduced Pocket POS, a mobile point-of-sale terminal about the size of a mobile phone that enables servers to take orders, manage tabs, process payments, and communicate with hosts and hostesses, as well as kitchen staff, …

Monthly global ransomware attacks hit an all-time high in March, totaling 460. That’s a 62% increase from the same period a year earlier, and a 91% increase from the prior month, according to the fall edition of Visa Inc.’s 2023 Biannual Threats Report. Leading causes for ransomware attacks are criminals …

Visa Inc., which has been working with blockchain-based currencies at least since the start of the decade, on Monday said it is starting to expand its cryptocurrency services into merchant acquiring, largely for cross-border transactions. The move, which Visa calls a “pilot project,” involves the major merchant processors Worldpay and …