Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have been tokenizing their payment cards since 2014, but have not been able to access tokens for cards branded by the other network. That will change soon as the result of an agreement announced separately Thursday by Visa and MasterCard. Under the agreement, Visa will be able …

In a move that expands its business as a provider of risk-control services for merchants and card issuers, Visa Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to acquire e-commerce payment-authentication provider CardinalCommerce Corp. Founded in 1999, Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce’s signature product is Cardinal Secure Authentication, a service that uses …

Retailers can expect a bump up in the dollars consumers load on closed-loop gift cards this holiday season as a festive spirit takes hold and more merchants favor the cards over holiday discounts, according to a forecast released last month by payments consultancy Mercator Advisory Group. “Retailers are expecting that …

• Credit cards were implicated in 59% of all fraudulent online transactions for the period stretching from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, up from 49% for the same period last year and from 44% in 2014, according to data from iovation, a device-authentication company. Still, fraudulent traffic overall for the period …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews U.S. shoppers flooded into stores and online this past weekend—Macy’s Web site crashed on Black Friday from the crush—to find holiday gift deals, with many putting their chip cards to use, though e-commerce spending, where the fraud-prevention feature of the chip is immaterial, continues to increase. In …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Can First Data Corp. shake its reputation as the aircraft carrier of the payments industry, a behemoth processor that is anything but nimble? It can, according to a new report from a securities firm. “First Data becoming increasingly competitive,” says the headline in the report by Chicago-based …

Sports and entertainment venue operator The Madison Square Garden Co. (MSG) on Tuesday disclosed a nearly year-long breach of payment card information involving customers who bought concessions at five of its venerable properties. And a new study from Federal Reserve researchers makes six recommendations for improving mobile-payments security, one of …

• Payments-services provider ACI Worldwide Inc. said it expects the rate of attempted online fraud in the United States during the holiday shopping season will increase 43% over the same period last year, based on transaction data it has seen so far. This increase follows U.S. adoption of EMV cards at the …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Retailers can expect a bump upward in the dollars consumers load on closed-loop gift cards this holiday season as a festive spirit takes hold and more merchants favor the cards over holiday discounts, according to a forecast released Friday by payments consultancy Mercator Advisory Group. “Retailers …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The PCI Security Standards Council is devising recommendations for protecting payment transactions on devices connected to the Internet of Things, a network with endpoints researchers say already number in the billions. The Wakefield, Mass.-based PCI Council, which oversees a number of security standards for the protection of …