Thursday , March 28, 2024

Visa Gets OK for Visa Europe Purchase and other Digital Transactions News briefs

• 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.

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