Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Open banking, the ability for third-party developers to access financial data in traditional banking systems, as defined by Stripe Inc., may provide one component for a new payment type, at least one that has limited use today. Pay by bank, a payment method that enables an online payment without the …

(Editor’s note: This is Part II of a two-part article. Part I appeared Thursday.) Interchange fees paid by merchants are the credit card industry’s second-largest revenue source. For debit cards and neobanks, these fees are a primary revenue source. The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act imposed price controls on debit interchange fees …

Evolving merchant expectations are a primary factor in Aurora Payments’ newly released Arise Payment Platform, which is intended to match sellers’ needs, says Brian Goudie, Aurora chief executive. Announced Tuesday, the Arise platform includes same-day onboarding capability, surcharging, cash discounting, and dual- pricing options, Aurora says. It also offers acceptance …

Consumer demand for buy now, pay later loans may be high, but consumers are still at risk of overspending when using BNPL to finance a purchase or missing a payment. A survey released Thursday by Bankrate LLC reveals that overspending and missing a payment are two of the most common …

The generative AI revolution received a significant boost from Discover Financial Services with the card network’s announcement early Tuesday it is deploying the artificial-intelligence technology within the Google Cloud platform in Discover’s call center. With the deployment, Discover’s nearly 10,000 customer-service agents will have access to intelligent document summarization through …

Mastercard Inc. announced an organizational realignment that centers on core payments, commercial and new payment flows, and services. Jorn Lambert will lead core payments as chief product officer. Raj Seshadri will head commercial and new payment flows as chief commercial payments officer. Craig Vosburg becomes the chief services officer in charge …

The promise of lower credit and debit card processing fees is a big attraction for merchants to switch merchant providers. Statement reviews are a key part of that process and now PayBlox, a merchant services referral site, has enlisted artificial intelligence to help. With the debut of its Statement Spy …

Consumers are not only favoring contactless payments more, they are relying more on their mobile wallets to initiate payments, according to the NFC Forum’s bi-annual Near Field Communication Usage and Adoption study. The study, conducted by ABI Research, reveals that 95% of respondents have left their physical wallets at home …

Pay by bank is not a new electronic-payments concept—consumers have been paying utility bills with their bank accounts for years—but the promise of lower fees and reduced merchant headaches is energizing the service, and work is at hand developing new use cases. Witness Radial Inc., an e-commerce platform adopting Link …

Capital One’s proposed $35.3-billion acquisition of Discover will be a thunderclap for the debit-card, retail-banking, and payment-network markets. The Discover network has long been the number-five U.S. retail-payment network, after Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and PayPal. Since its acquisition of Diners Club from Citi in 2008, Discover has struggled as …

The top 50 originating financial institutions on the automated clearing house network hit nearly 27.7 billion in payments in 2023, a 5.7% increase over 2022, Nacha says. Volume for the top 50 receiving FIs was almost 20 billion payments in 2023, a 6.4% increase from 2022. Herndon, Va.-based Nacha says …

Synthetic identity fraud has become the fastest growing form of digital fraud, totaling $3.1 billion in 2023, up from $1.9 million in 2020, a 63% increase, according to TransUnion LLC’s 2024 State of Omnichannel Fraud Report. Criminals are using synthetic identities, which are created from a combination of real and …

Chargebacks are always an issue for merchants. While there are numerous programs and indicators to identify fraudulent ones, detecting and managing first-party fraud—that committed by legitimate customers—can be tougher to root out. In response, Mastercard Inc. is pushing its First Party Trust Program, an artificial intelligence-based service that enables merchants …

The Federal Reserve launched a user group for the 607 financial institutions that have signed on so far to participate in FedNow, the real-time payments network the regulator launched last summer with 35 participants, a count that had reached 400 by January. All live financial institutions and certified service providers are eligible …

DoorDash Inc. has added 13 grocery-store chains to its platform that will accept electronic benefits transfer and SNAP cards for payment. The list of grocers—which includes, ACME Markets, Food City, Hy-Vee, Jewel-Osco, Kings Food Markets, Pavilions, Randalls, Shaw’s, Sprouts Farmers Market, Star Market, Stater Bros. Markets, Tom Thumb, and Vons—comprises …

As online shopping continues to stitch itself into consumer behavior, efforts to reduce chargebacks also advance. The latest is Riskified’s Auth Rate Enhance service that can pre-screen orders and provide more information for its customers to make a go-no-go decision on digital orders. Auth Rate Enhance, a component of Riskified’s …

Mastercard Inc. released Smart Subscriptions, a service to help issuers provide subscription-management tools to their cardholders. In related news, Recurly Inc., a subscription-services provider, released its consumer software subscription benchmark report. The Smart Subscriptions service builds on Mastercard’s Subscriptions Control product, released in 2023, to provide spend analysis, a way …

Consumer bill payments for the 10 most essential bills sum to $25,513 annually on average, according to new data from doxo inc., a bill-payments provider. Doxo’s “2024 U.S. Household Bill Pay Report” says that total corresponds to 34% of a consumer’s income spent across mortgage or rent, auto loans, utilities, …

CPI Card Group Inc. posted $444.5 million in net sales in 2023, a 7% decrease from 2022. The card and payments solutions provider saw an even larger drop during the fourth quarter, posting net sales of $102.9 million, a 19% year-over-year decrease. CPI attributed the declines to cautious consumer spending, …

Unattended payments specialist PayRange Inc. said it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against CSC ServiceWorks, an operator of laundry machines in multi-family housing and college dorms. This is in addition to a previous patent infringement suit it filed in March 2023 against CSC ServiceWorks. In the new suit, PayRange seeks more than …