Georgia has joined a small but growing number of states that have introduced legislation to ban the portion of credit and debit card transaction fees that apply to sales tax. The Georgia bill, introduced late last week by Georgia state senator Billy Hickman (R-Statesboro), proposes prohibiting the fees from being …

Mastercard Inc. is teaming with videogame-commerce company Xsolla in an effort to smooth online-gaming checkouts by enabling new payment options for Xsolla’s videogame platform, the card network said. Mastercard cardholders will be able pay for gaming purchasing using credit card loyalty points from participating merchants and issuers. They can also …

Bank of America Corp. said the 608 patents it received in 2022 was a record number and was 19% more than in 2021, with grants covering areas such as mobile banking and payments, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other technologies. Kasheesh, a digital payments platform than enables consumers to split payments …

A bill designed to allow merchants to have a choice of networks for routing credit card transactions failed to pass last year, but now international tensions could affect the proposed law’s prospects in the new Congress. The bill, called the Credit Card Competition Act, would mandate that merchants have a …

Cost surprises at checkout are the leading cause of cart abandonment, with 57% of consumers saying they walked away from checkout at least once in the past year because of unexpected delivery costs, according to a wide-ranging shopping report released by point-of-sale technology provider Verifone Inc., which surveyed 995 respondents globally. Price …

Real-time payments are getting more attention in financial services, and vendors are quickly enabling the faster-payment capability. Among the latest to do so is Sionic Corp., with its suite of services that includes its Verified Rapid Payments, and Oracle Corp., with a new set of cloud-based banking services. Atlanta-based Sionic …

Seeking to improve merchant adoption of PINless debit transactions, the U.S. Payments Forum Monday released a white paper detailing the potential obstacles to PINless debit implementation in the United States and how they can be overcome. One advantage of PINless debit transactions is that they can be processed faster than PIN-based debit transactions, …

Clickatell, a U.S. provider of mobile commerce and messaging solutions, announced late Thursday it is partnering with South Africa-based airline FlySafair to enable the airline’s customers to pay for checked luggage using the WhatsApp messaging channel. To make a payment, the airline’s customers access the WhatsApp channel on their mobile …

Merchant satisfaction with payment processors has dwindled in the past year, as sellers cope with the impact of inflation on their processing costs as well as on their business in general, according to J.D. Power’s 2023 U.S. Merchant Services Satisfaction Study. The merchant satisfaction score for merchant-services providers totaled 853, …

Observers have warned that an activist Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is likely to act on multiple fronts that involve the payments industry. Early Wednesday it released its latest proposal, a move to cut the $12 billion it estimates consumers pay annually in credit card late fees. While the proposal could …