Thursday , March 28, 2024

Facebook Planning a Crypto Payments System? and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 5/3/19

  • Facebook Inc. reportedly is planning a cryptocurrency-based payment system using a digital coin with stable value that would enable the social-networking giant to avoid fees it incurs for conventional card payments, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal cited by the Associated Press. The report says Facebook is recruiting dozens of financial firms and online merchants for its planned network.
  • Mastercard Inc. announced it has an agreement to acquire bill-payment services provider Transactis Inc. Terms of the deal, which Mastercard expects to close by June 30, were not disclosed. Transactis’s platform will complement the Mastercard Bill Pay Exchange service that Mastercard announced last October and will be fully launched later this year.
  • ATM network owner and operator Cardtronics plc said U.S. same-store cash-withdrawal transactions grew 2% year-over-year in the first quarter, but total revenues fell 5% to $318.3 million, 2% on a constant-currency basis, mainly because of lower interchange rates in the United Kingdom’s Link ATM network.
  • The National ATM Council said its 2019 Survey on U.S. Retail ATM Vault Cash Bank Account Closures/Denial found that 44% of ATM deployers reported the closure of their ATM vault-cash accounts and their other business and personal bank accounts. Almost 70% of the accounts involved the largest national banks.
  • The Grill at Calvary Chapel Fort Lauderdale announced a point-of-sale system data breach following an April 2 notification from Pinnacle Hospitality Systems, its POS system provider, that malware, which sought track date, was discovered. The malware was operational from July 23, 2018, to February 20. The Grill did not provide an estimate of the number of cards affected by the breach.

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