Mastercard Inc. said it is purchasing Ethoca Inc., a fraud-mitigation firm, for an undisclosed amount. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter. Ethoca works with more than 5,000 merchants and 4,000 financial institutions. Mastercard intends to expand Ethoca’s capabilities and combine the company with its current security …

Observers of the U.S. payments market who have been expecting a surge in conversions to dual-interface cards may have been disappointed Wednesday morning as CPI Card Group Inc., one of the nation’s biggest card manufacturers, said it expects “dual interface to grow gradually as a proportion of the U.S. market” …

PayPal Holdings Inc. introduced a so-called rainbow card for users of its Venmo peer-to-peer payments service. The colorful plastic, available for a limited time, is the latest version of a debit card PayPal launched last year to allow users to pay merchants with their Venmo balance. As with the original …

Hamburger chain The Wendy’s Co. announced a $50 million settlement of class-action lawsuits filed against it after a data breach that began in 2015. The 7,500 bank and credit-union plaintiffs alleged the breach was caused by malware that affected point-of-sale systems at more than 1,000 franchised Wendy’s locations. Some 18 …

While global card expenditures will increase 80% to $45 trillion by 2023 from $25 trillion in 2017, growth in the United States will be slow compared to other regions because the U.S. is already a well-developed market, says RBR Research in its “Global Payment Cards Data and Forecasts to 2023” …

Twenty-two days of talking to clients haven’t dampened Fiserv Inc.’s conviction that offering to buy First Data Corp. is the right move. In fact, if anything these conversations seem to have buoyed top executives’ confidence in the proposed $22 billion all-stock acquisition of the big processor. “We’ve spent a substantial …

As if retailers and merchants didn’t have anything else to worry about, a malware threat called IcedID wants to set itself off as a special type, says a researcher at IBM Corp. In a blog post released Wednesday, the researcher says the criminal gangs using IcedID—disovered and named by IBM …

Merchant-processing revenues from North America grew 7% year-over-year in 2018’s fourth quarter to $1.1 billion on a comparable accounting basis, First Data Corp. reported Wednesday. First Data, which has an agreement to be acquired by processor Fiserv Inc. in a $22 billion all-stock deal, reported total quarterly revenues of $1.42 …

With the proposed merger of processing giants First Data Corp. and Fiserv Inc. looming over the payments landscape, players that both work and compete with the two companies are in a potentially ticklish position. But the chief executive of one such company made it clear Wednesday morning that First Data …

The concept of push payments is finding favor among payments providers as two companies separately announce new disbursement services. Atlanta-based Repay said its Instant Funding service enables organizations to send funds directly to eligible Visa Inc. debit and prepaid cards via Visa Direct, the network’s real-time debit service. Repay’s lending clients, …