Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• VeriFone Systems Inc. introduced Verifone Carbon, a black, portable point-of-sale system for café owners, quick-service restaurants, and stores that features a tablet screen for the merchant and a smaller screen for the customer, and a stand with a built-in printer. The Intel-powered device includes VeriFone’s cloud-based Commerce Platform that enables businesses to run loyalty and management applications.
• Processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) completed its $2.35 billion acquisition of merchant acquirer TransFirst Holdings Inc.; the combined entity will serve 645,000 U.S. merchant locations and process $117 billion in annual charge volume.
• An RBC Capital Markets report says American Express Co. is at risk of losing its cobranded card relationship with Starwood Hotels and Resorts now that Marriott International is the apparent winner to buy Starwood after a Chinese insurance company withdrew its bid; AmEx rival JPMorgan Chase & Co. issues the Marriott Rewards Visa cards. AmEx is losing its big cobranded-card and merchant-acceptance relationship with Costco Wholesale Corp., which is switching to Citigroup Inc. and Visa Inc. as its credit card partners.
• Wire-transfer provider The Western Union Co. launched its WU EDGE, for Enterprise Digital Global Exchange, a cross-border business-to-business platform for small and mid-sized businesses to trade internationally; the service could compete with ones offered by Amazon.com Inc. and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
• MasterCard Inc. announced it will help World Vision International, a Christian disaster-relief and development organization, deliver humanitarian aid through digital-identity and electronic-payment technologies.
• Artificial Intelligence and Image Analysis (A2iA), a developer of text-recognition and information-extraction technology, and Danal Inc., which offers the BilltoMobile carrier-billing payments service, unveiled “ID Double Check,” an online identity-verification service for banks, health-care agencies, e-commerce providers and other companies in the U.S. and European Union.
