Vendors of parking apps in North America have an even more potent new competitor with the closing on Tuesday of EasyPark Group’s acquisition of the Park Now Group, which includes Atlanta-based ParkMobile LLC. The deal, which the companies announced in March, brings a major North American stake to Stockholm-based EasyPark, …

A brief thought experiment illustrates the benefits—and risks—of breaking up the dominant network duo. Bank card networks Mastercard and Visa were the 20th century’s greatest payments innovation. Today, there’s a worldwide competitive patchwork of hundreds of “card” networks and alternative payment systems. But Mastercard and Visa are the only two …

The transition to contactless payments offers a rare opportunity to meet another priority by ushering in sustainable payment cards. Through the Covid-19 pandemic, business operations and consumer interactions with their finances have fundamentally changed. The past year has seen a major acceleration in the shift away from cash, with the …

With less face-to-face sales in 2020, merchant acquirers quickly adapted to other selling methods. Some of these methods will stick around. The Covid-19 pandemic has become known as the catalyst that gave contactless payments the adoption rate it once struggled to achieve. Now, a similar transformation appears to have happened …

Pressure is building on the Federal Reserve to take action on a debit card interchange-fee regulation that it has left intact for 10 years despite sweeping changes in the payments business, including an onrush of e-commerce transactions over the past year. In part, observers are reacting to a report the …

Libra—er, sorry, Diem—is coming home to the United States, a bit bruised but also a bit wiser than when it left. Bruised but unbowed, the Facebook-inspired blockchain initiative announced in May it is quitting Switzerland and linking up with La Jolla, Calif.-based Silvergate Bank as it plots the next stage …

At the height of the pandemic last spring, the World Bank projected that 2020 remittances to low- and middle-income countries would decline by 20% year-over-year—nearly $445 billion—because of lower wages and growing unemployment among migrant workers. And in the process, there would be yet another casualty of Covid-19 as the …

Building on what it says is its strategy to make electronic bill payment simpler and more accessible to consumers, doxo Inc. is offering consumers a bill-payment service that avoids fees.  The Seattle-based provider of digital billing and payment services says it is bypassing the transaction fees some billers, such as …

With consumers becoming more comfortable returning to in-store shopping as Covid-19 vaccinations roll out, J.P. Morgan is partnering with U.S. processor ACI Worldwide Inc. to enable merchants in Europe and the United Kingdom to offer in-store payment acceptance. The deal expands J.P. Morgan’s omnichannel processing presence by giving merchants a …

Sift Science Inc. has agreed to acquire Chargeback Inc., a specialist in applying dispute-resolution technology to help merchants resolve chargebacks. Terms were not announced. The deal comes as card-not-present fraud in particular is soaring as consumers over the past year have adopted online shopping, many for the first time. U.S. …