Mastercard Inc. launched Assemble, a prepaid service aimed at Millennials that features a digital prepaid account, a mobile app, and a physical or digital card. The service also includes budgeting capability and peer-to-peer payments through Mastercard Send. The company says it plans to extend versions of Assemble to other markets, …

The first Bitcoin futures contracts began trading at 6 p.m. Eastern Time Sunday and almost right away the volume of activity crashed a Web site operated by the exchange, Cboe Global Markets Inc. After an initial run up, Bitcoin was trading around $16,500 by 10 a.m. Monday. A rival exchange, …

Consumer revolving credit jumped 9.9% on an annualized basis in October, seasonally adjusted preliminary data from the Federal Reserve show. Revolving credit outstandings, most of which are credit card debt, hit $1.01 trillion, up 5.9% from $955.3 billion in October 2016. PayCargo LLC, an online-payment platform that allows shippers and carriers to …

Valve Corp., which operates Steam, a popular gaming site, said it no longer is accepting Bitcoin because of the digital currency’s volatility and acceptance costs, which reached almost $20 in a transaction last week. Bitcoin processor BitPay Inc. said it raised $30 million in additional funding. In 2014, the company …

American Express Co. chairman and CEO Kenneth I. Chenault said at an investor conference Tuesday that banks’ sale of their stakes in Mastercard and Visa through initial public offerings “was one of the biggest strategic blunders of the last 20 years,” according to Bloomberg. Chenault, who will retire in February, …

Finastra, a banking-technology services firm, announced PNC Bank, a unit of The PNC Financial Services Group Inc., is using its services as part of the bank’s participation in RTP, the real-time payments service from The Clearing House. Fifty-percent of U.S. banks plan to increase their investments in real-time payment systems in …

Processor First Data Corp. completed its previously announced, $760 million acquisition of independent sales organization BluePay Holdings Inc.  Payment-services provider Shift4 Corp. announced its EMV-certified services are now available to users of Posera Ltd.’s Maitre’D point-of-sale hospitality software. Infinite Peripherals launched the InfineaRetail Airline Edition point-of-sale suite of products. Mastercard …

B2 Processing Solutions launched the B2 PINPad Drivers, a product to help merchants migrate point-of-sale applications to EMV and contactless payments. Payments provider BlueSnap Inc. said its merchants experienced a 125% increase in mobile-wallet use on Thanksgiving, 124% increases on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and a 79% increase …

Payment consulting and testing firm Fime obtained D-Payment Application Specification (D-PAS) accreditation from Discover Financial Services for the Pulse debit network, meaning Fime’s EMV chip card service for merchant acquirers is now available on all of Discover’s networks that include Discover and Diners Club International in addition to Pulse. SalePoint …

Research firm comScore Inc. said Thanksgiving e-commerce spending on desktop devices totaled $1.57 billion, a 22% increase from last year. Black Friday spending was $2.36 billion, a 20% increase from 2016. ComScore said 115 million consumers visited online retail sites on Thanksgiving, with 61% of them only visiting using a …