Welcome to the murky world of bank card network fees, on which Visa and Mastercard make handsome livings. The fees reward investors, but what about acquirers and card issuers? Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. have become two of the most beloved companies on Wall Street since their initial public offerings …

The Visa Inc. transaction machine continued to spit out profits in the payment network’s final quarter of fiscal 2017, but chief executive Alfred F. Kelly doesn’t want anyone to think he ignores competitive threats such as the rise of China’s Alipay or real-time payment services from other companies. “I think …

First Data Corp. made it official: it is acquiring merchant processor BluePay Holdings Inc. for $760 million in cash. BluePay processes $19 billion annually for 77,000 merchants and is integrated into more than 450 software platforms. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. First Data inadvertently …

Risk-management firm ThreatMetrix Inc. said its ThreatMetrix ID product, announced this week, uses unique, anonymized customer data to help businesses make decisions about trust and identity. The product, hailed as the company’s flagship, incorporates four central capabilities. One is the unique, anonymous data it has on 1.4 billion users in …

Performance Matters, which offers professional instruction for public-school educators, has agreed to use SchoolPay, a unit of My Payment Network, to process payments for professional development for teachers in kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms. MoneyOnMobile Inc., a Dallas-based company with operations in India, said it processed more than 1 million domestic transfers in …

The Faster Payments Task Force issued a final report in July with an eye-popping goal: National, real-time payments by 2020. Here’s a guide to the 16 providers that might just do the job. In July, the Federal Reserve-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force capped off two years of hard work with …

Payments provider NXT-ID Inc. announced its FitPay Inc. subsidiary is providing the payments technology for the vivoactive 3, a new smart watch from Garmin International Inc. Dubbed Garmin Pay, the service supports contactless payments made with Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. credit and debit cards from major issuing banks. Earlier this week, Fitbit Inc. introduced Fitbit Pay. In …

QualPay, a provider of cloud-based, integrated-payments solutions, launched a developer portal allowing integrators to evaluate and deploy payment services. Person-to-person payments by users of services offered by community banks and credit unions average $450, compared to $25 for users of Venmo, a popular third-party app, according to data from Malauzai Software, …

Acquirers wanting to tap into the ever-growing number of e-commerce merchants, especially small businesses, might do well to target a handful of U.S. cities with large bases of retail entrepreneurs. E-commerce platform provider Volusion released this week a list of the top 10 cities based on volume of merchants and …

• A London judge has rejected an effort by a consumer group in the United Kingdom to bring an $18 billion class-action suit against Mastercard Inc., according to Bloomberg News. The case is related to the card network’s cross-border transaction fees. • Square Inc. announced that Randy Garutti, chief executive of …