Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The basis of digital payments is typically an account at a financial institution, which can hand these institutions quite a bit of influence over payment activity. It turns out, though, that consumers like to stick with their bank once they’ve opened an account. Even among persons aged 18 to 34, …

LINGA rOS, a provider of restaurant point-of-sale technology, said it will work with Evertec Inc., a payments processor concentrated in the Caribbean and Latin America, to serve the hospitality market in those regions.Unattended payments provider Cantaloupe Inc. announced Enhance, an artificial intelligence and machine learning technology-based service from Hivery, a data-science company, …

There are few subjects that raise the ire of merchants more than the runaway costs of card acceptance. For years, many have grumbled about the costs but felt powerless to do anything about them. Now, as the result of a chain of court victories at the state and federal level, …

The world’s banking giants may or may not adopt cryptocurrencies at some point, but they are clearly looking to adopt the distributed-ledger technology that undergirds digital money. In the latest such move, Wells Fargo & Co. and HSBC Bank plc early Monday announced they have agreed to process cross-border transactions …

Merchant services company Stax has acquired CardX LLC, a Chicago-based surcharging provider, in an effort to better meet demand for surcharging, especially among enterprise clients. Terms were not disclosed. The deal is the third of 2021 for Orlando, Fla.-based Stax, whose parent company is Fattmerchant . Founded in 2013, CardX has …

As part of its efforts to expand real-time payments globally, financial-service technology provider Nium Pte. Ltd., has partnered with Roxe, a global payment network that uses blockchain technology to settle transactions. The partnership will allow Roxe to leverage the reach of Nium’s network to initiate cross-border payouts, including those from …

In the latest battle of the titans over credit card interchange, Amazon.com Inc. may enjoy the advantage of size but could be pursuing a risky strategy unless other retailers line up with it, according to a long-time observer of transaction-pricing dustups. The massive online merchant on Wednesday said it will …

An increase in the limit on what contactless cardholders in the United Kingdom can spend before they are required to authenticate themselves is raising questions about whether the new mandate will prompt consumers to shun their cards in favor of mobile wallets, which have no per transaction limit. The theory is …

One of the first moves to bring a payment system not controlled by Apple Inc. to Apple’s App Store emerged Thursday and follows a landmark federal-court ruling last month. Paddle Ltd., a London-based payments provider, said it will begin offering the alternative Dec. 7, in line with the terms of …

Purchase scams, in which consumers pay for goods that never arrive, was the number-one fraud type in the second quarter in terms of card-fraud attempts, beating out social-engineering frauds, according to fraud-prevention firm Feedzai. The top city for overall fraud attempts was Las Vegas, with fraud up 411% in the quarter …

Payments provider Datacap Systems Inc. is partnering with iStream Financial Services to add support for automated clearing house payments processing through Datacap’s NETePay payments platform and using Datacap’s PayAPI application programming interface. Datacap acquired the NETePay hosted payment gateway from Octopi (formerly Monetary.co) in 2019. The deal with iStream will enable …

On-the-spot installment lending, known now as buy now, pay later, has achieved such a high profile since the onset of the pandemic last year that observers are starting to calculate just how much consumer spending it’s accounting for—and how much risk it might pose for consumers and lenders. A report …

Seeking to provide online merchants with a lower-cost payment option and consumers a better user experience, a 3-year-old, Toronto-based payment-service startup called Clik2pay is enabling Canadian consumers to pay for online purchases directly from their bank accounts at participating merchants. The new payment option, which launched Thursday, leverages the Interac …

Looking to move further upmarket from the small sellers it started with, Square Inc. on Wednesday announced it is launching its Square Register point-of-sale system in Canada. Square is promoting the technology, which includes a screen facing the customer as well as one for the merchant, as suited to a …

Accelerated adoption of digital payments during the pandemic helped drive up biometric identity checks by a factor of 20 for ComplyCube in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2020, said the company, which specializes in anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance.Park Place Payments said it signed with acquirer Payroc …

While the two global payments networks have been embroiled in a controversy over merchant debit card fees in the U.S. market, they also face trouble in the United Kingdom over an even bigger issue: credit card interchange fees. That fact was thrown into relief early Thursday when Reuters reported the …

With the popularity of the buy now, pay later alternative growing, especially for online purchases, PayPal Holdings Inc. announced Tuesday it will no longer charge late fees for missed payments on its installment products in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, effective Oct. 1. PayPal has already eliminated …

The U.S. Department of Justice on Wednesday lent its weight to a proposed rule from the Federal Reserve Board that would reinforce merchants’ choice of networks for e-commerce transactions arising from debit cards. At the same time, it suggested the rule could be made more stringent. Justice’s support for the …

With a Federal Reserve deadline hitting Wednesday for comments on decade-old debit card regulations, large merchants are firing some last-minute salvos in hopes of influencing the Fed to make major revisions to rules governing transaction routing and pricing. “[M]ajor banks and networks continue to interfere with competition for debit business,” …

With credit card acceptance rates expected to rise next spring, payments-technology firms are starting to launch services for merchants that they say will soften the blow. The latest comes in the automobile-repair industry with an announcement Tuesday by Facepay Inc. of general availability of a service aimed at replacing credit …