Law and Regulation

The nation’s automated clearing house network handled 7.5 billion transactions in the fourth quarter of 2021, up 6.1% over the same period in 2020, Nacha reported Thursday. The growth was driven largely by gains in health-care and business-to-business payments, as well as robust increases in same-day ACH, the network’s faster-payments …

Mastercard Inc. launched Mastercard Track Instant Pay, a platform enabling instant payment of supplier invoices via virtual card transactions supported by machine learning. The service is available in the United States now, with plans to expand globally.Nuvei Corp. has been approved by the New York State Gaming Commission to process payments for …

Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to pull back from its threat to stop accepting Visa cards issued in the United Kingdom may have evoked a sigh of relief among some consumers, not to mention at Visa itself, but it also could betoken some complex dynamics behind the decision-making at both corporate giants. …

As part of its effort to help users of its Phixius payment-data network mitigate fraud and enhance payment-routing certainty, Nacha announced Thursday the network will enable originators, fintechs, and financial institutions that originate and receive electronic payments to verify payment-related information, such as account ownership, account numbers, and routing information. …

Buy now, pay later loans are extremely popular, especially among Millennials and Gen Zers, because the loans give them more purchasing power, and they can spread out the payments, usually without having to pay interest.  Yet, despite the immense popularity of BNPL loans, evidence is emerging that consumers with multiple …

Sports-betting payments specialist PayNearMe Inc. said it has gained approval from the New York Gaming Commission to provide its MoneyLine platform to licensed operators in that state.Fly Now Pay Later, a buy now, pay later provider for travel services, closed a $75 million debt funding round from Atalaya Capital Management that will …

Central bank digital currencies, cryptoassets, and privacy are three major priorities for the Electronic Transactions Association in 2022, the payments industry’s top lobbying group announced late Friday. All three are hot-button topics featuring strong opinions on opposing sides, presenting the payments industry with an uncertain roadmap for navigating the issues …

LINGA rOS, a provider of restaurant point-of-sale technology, said it will work with Evertec Inc., a payments processor concentrated in the Caribbean and Latin America, to serve the hospitality market in those regions.Unattended payments provider Cantaloupe Inc. announced Enhance, an artificial intelligence and machine learning technology-based service from Hivery, a data-science company, …

Security professionals around the world equate ransomware attacks with terrorism, but they differ markedly from country to country in their willingness to play ball with the attackers. That’s according to survey results released Tuesday that gathered data from more than 1,500 security executives in the United States, the United Kingdom, …

The explosion in buy now, pay later point-of-sale lending was bound to catch the eye of regulators sooner or later, and on Thursday the other shoe dropped with a letter sent to five leading BNPL firms from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau requesting information on their services. The five—Affirm Inc., …