Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Braintree Inc.’s arrangement to allow its merchants to accept Bitcoin could significantly further a nascent trend among big merchants to take the digital money. Braintree, which PayPal Inc. acquired a year ago for $800 million, processes payments for such fast-growing merchants as house-rental service Airbnb, restaurant-reservation site OpenTable, and taxi alternative …
September, 2014
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9 September
Payment Processors Hold Key Tokenization Role In Apple Pay
Payment processors First Data Corp. and Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) will have key roles in securing transactions using tokenization technology for payments consumers make with Apple Inc.’s newly announced Apple Pay mobile-payments scheme. The Cupertino, Calif.-based computer giant made the announcement as part of its unveiling Tuesday of …
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9 September
Apple Unveils an ‘Entirely New Payment Process’ with Apple Pay
After weeks of fevered anticipation, it’s finally out. Apple Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a new payments system called Apple Pay along with its iPhone 6 and large-screen iPhone 6 Plus smart phones and a snazzy new smart watch. As predicted, the updated iPhone uses near-field communication (NFC) technology for fast …
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8 September
Twitter Launches M-Commerce Test With a ‘Buy’ Button and 28 Partners
In its latest move toward becoming a force in electronic payments, social network Twitter Inc. reported Monday that it is starting a test allowing members to make purchases via tweets from 28 partners that include merchants, rock bands and non-profits. “For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow …
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4 September
Accepting Only Digital Money, Bitcoin Shop Overhauls Its Online Marketplace
Bitcoin Shop Inc. runs an e-commerce marketplace offering about 140,000 products, which on the face of it isn’t all that remarkable. What sets the 1-year-old site apart, though, is that it accepts only digital currency. No cards or bank-account transfers, please, just Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. But Arlington, Va.-based Bitcoin …
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4 September
The U.S. EMV Migration Produces a Windfall for POS Terminal Producer VeriFone
It’s a good time to be a point-of-sale terminal maker when all of your customers have to go through the payments equivalent of abandoning the horse and buggy and jumping into an automobile. With a major U.S. deadline for converting from magnetic-stripe payment cards to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card …
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4 September
Home Depot Hires Data-Security Firms As Other Merchants Contend With Breaches
Big box hardware retailer The Home Depot Inc. has hired two data-security firms to delve into its point-of-sale systems to determine the extent of a possible breach first reported on Tuesday. Security site KrebsOnSecurity.com said then that several banks it contacted said they saw evidence that Home Depot stores …
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3 September
Eye on Branding: As Wallets Struggle, MCX Dubs Its Scheme CurrentC While Isis Says It Is Now Softcard
The Merchant Customer Exchange, a retailer-controlled mobile payment scheme, has given its service a name. Dubbed CurrentC, the service will not be available outside of testing until 2015. First announced in 2012, the long-gestating scheme aims to give participating retailers their own mobile-wallet service that eschews the traditional payment …
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2 September
Often Linked to Mobile Payments, Location-Based Rewards Aren’t Rewarding for Everyone
Mobile-payments providers have looked to offers and rewards as a means of engaging with consumers and merchants and boosting payments activity. Indeed, most mobile strategists value the technology’s ability to deliver rewards at the moment consumers are in the store, if not necessarily in front of the relevant merchandise. But …
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2 September
Rumors Cast Apple’s Prospective Role as a Payments Provider as a Done Deal
In case you spent the entire Labor Day long weekend in a fishing boat on a remote lake, you could barely miss the stories moving over the business wires in recent days about Apple Inc. and electronic payments. In sum, the iconic computer maker and iTunes and App Store provider …