Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Visa Inc. said the European Commission, the competition authority of the European Union, approved its planned acquisition of bank card association Visa Europe Ltd.; the $23-billion-plus deal has now received all regulatory approvals, and Visa Inc. expects it to close by June 30.
• Visa debuted a payment ring for Team Visa sponsored athletes to use at the Rio 2016 Olympic games that has near-field communication payment capabilities. Visa says it is the exclusive payment provider of the games and that it will oversee approximately 4,000 NFC-enabled point-of-sale terminals for the event.
• Payments firm JetPay Corp. completed its acquisition of CollectorSolutions Inc., a payment card processor specializing in the government, utility, and non-profit sectors; JetPay is funding the deal by issuing 3.25 million JetPay common shares to CSI’s stockholders and assuming up to $1.5 million of its debt.
• The digital-currency community is debating whether an upstart called Ethereum might overcome Bitcoin’s so-called first-mover advantage and ultimately displace the 7-year-old cryptocurrency. The discussion stems from a recent decision by Coinbase, a major digital-currency exchange, to start trading ethers, the currency sponsored by Ethereum, according to a report by Coindesk.
• Bank of America Corp. has handled $16 billion so far this year in mobile peer-to-peer payments, most of it on the clearXchange P2P network, the bank announced Thursday, according to a report by CNBC. BofA and four other banks owned clearXchange until October, when the network was acquired by Early Warning Services LLC, which is also partly owned by BofA.
• Retail consultancy Boston Retail Partners says 75% of retailers plan to have a single commerce platform within three years, according to its 2016 Customer Experience/Unified Commerce Survey. It also found that 51% put creating a “seamless and optimized experience across channels” as a top priority this year.
• Antifraud services provider Kaspersky Lab unveiled its Kaspersky Embedded Systems Security product to protect point-of-sale terminals and ATMs from remote attacks and on-site compromises via USB sticks.
