Human-initiated cybercrime attacks in the United States and Canada decreased 6% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019, finds the biannual Cybercrime Report from LexisNexis Risk Solutions. Even automated bot attacks dipped—by 0.3%—in the period. But, as with all things related to online fraud, …

Biometric authentication may be coming into its own as a tool to aid financial institutions and payments companies in serving their customers. At financial institutions, as much as $20.75 million is saved annually using biometric authentication instead of SMS one-time password services, says Reston, Va.-based Daon Inc., a biometric-services company, …

Payments provider NMI LLC announced Thursday it has acquired the commercial division of Sphere, a cloud-based software and payments-technology company. Sphere Commercial Division primarily serves non-integrated small and mid-size businesses. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Schaumburg, Ill.-based NMI says the acquisition will strengthen its underwriting and risk-management capabilities …

Desjardins Group, said to be the biggest financial cooperative in North America, said it will transfer its credit card processing function to Fiserv Inc. The deal is said to be the first such “large-scale” engagement in Canada for Fiserv. Business-to-business buy now, pay later platform Playter launched Paid, a service that lets Playter clients …

For years, payments fintechs with a bank charter have labored under a requirement that, for money movement, deposit-taking, and other related services, they largely had to work with another federally chartered bank. This week, the nation’s top banking regulator announced an important change to its rules that could sweep away …

The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC announced it will soon introduce tokenization for checking account and routing numbers on transactions financial institutions run over TCH’s RTP real-time payments and EPN automated clearing house networks.Of 80 mid-tier U.S. financial institutions surveyed by Volante Technologies, 37% of these not already connected to The Clearing …

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., dropped its plans to offer banking services to consumers, The Wall Street Journal reported late Friday. Google announced in November it intended to debut Plex, a mobile-first bank account integrated into Google Pay.Payments provider Park Place Payments said it will pay $500 to clients that drop the service within the …

Now that Google Inc. is making a play for the heart of payments—the checking account—some observers see the strategy’s first fruit as likely to be a move into a massive market long controlled by banks and service providers. “It’s huge,” Krista Tedder, director of payments at Javelin Strategy & Research, …