Atos, parent company of France-based processor Worldline S.A., said Worldline has a deal with payment processor First Data Corp. to buy First Data’s subsidiaries in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, collectively known as First Data Baltics, for €73 million ($85.1 million) in cash. The acquisition comes little more than a week …

Gift cards issued by retailers are heating up, according to the latest research from Mercator Advisory Group. Total loads grew 6% in 2016 to reach $133.9 billion, according to Mercator’s Ben Jackson. That performance follows a decline in loads the year before. The research, which covers closed-loop gift cards as …

Payments observers have expected Apple Inc. to add person-to-person payments to its Apple Pay mobile-payments service for almost as long as the mobile wallet has been available, and last month, the computing giant obliged. Without adding much detail, Apple announced that users of its Messages feature will be able to …

Republican backers of repeal of the Durbin Amendment lost a key battle this spring because they concentrated their arguments on Congressmen and financial institutions. Success in the future will depend on firing up consumers, argues Eric Grover. On June 8, the House of Representatives passed the Financial Choice Act, albeit …

By Peter Lucas @DTPaymentNews With the launch of its Prime Reload rewards service, Amazon.com Inc. has positioned itself to deal a serious blow to bank card issuers’ revenues earned from interchange on Amazon.com purchases, and limit the visibility banks have into their cardholders’ behavior on the e-commerce giant’s Web site. …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is giving customers another reason both to take its credit cards and use its Walmart Pay mobile wallet by enabling new cardholders to use their credit accounts immediately upon approval via Walmart Pay rather than having to wait for a plastic card to come in the mail. …

Consumers have a new way to get, and pay for, clean clothes with the debut of Washlava. As announced this week, Washlava offers consumers a smart-phone app they can use to reserve washers and dryers, and then pay for that use. The service, another indicator of the increasing incidence of …

Gift cards issued by retailers are heating up, according to the latest research from Mercator Advisory Group. Total loads grew 6% in 2016 to reach $133.9 billion, Mercator’s Ben Jackson tells Digital Transactions News. That performance follows a decline in loads the year before. The research, which covers closed-loop gift …

Payments observers have expected Apple Inc. to add person-to-person payments to its Apple Pay mobile-payments service for almost as long as the mobile wallet has been available, and on Monday, the computing giant obliged. Without adding much detail, Apple announced that users of its iMessage feature will be able to …

While much of the corporate world has high hopes for a business-friendly bent from the Trump Administration, two policy analysts on Wednesday poured cold water on some of the payments industry’s fondest hopes for regulatory relief. One such hope, to scrap a 1,689-page rule regulating prepaid cards, was sinking fast …