By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The number of data breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center in 2017 hit 698 as of May 30, a 35.3% increase over the record pace of a year ago when the ITRC flagged 516 breaches in 2016’s first five months. The San Diego-based nonprofit monitors …

• EDGE Mobile Payments LLC, which offers a card-consolidation device, said it is offering users of the former Coin card a discount on the purchase of its EDGE Card. Fitbit Inc. purchased Coin in 2016, and the service was shuttered earlier this year. • PayPal Holdings Inc.’s dominance in e-commerce payments …

For former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Bob Carr, the next venture goes beyond simply making money. Carr led the $4.3 billion sale of his old company to Global Payments Inc. in April 2016. But rather than ride off into a comfortable retirement, Carr is back with his latest …

When you’ve got something hot like stolen credit card numbers, you have only a brief opportunity to cash in before they go cold. Manually sifting through hundreds, even thousands, of card accounts bought in bulk can take more time than criminals have, which is why they increasingly are relying on …

For the China-based Alipay payments service, pursuing niche merchant markets in North America no longer is good enough. “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” says Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America. Those partners so far include First Data Corp., which in May opened its huge U.S. …

The connection between computing capacity and payment practice is obvious to all. While passing coins hand-to-hand remains a ritual, the bulk of human transactions are carried out through electronic computing. Now, all the computers that we know—mainframes, minis, PCs, tablets, smart phones, and so on—are a special case of a …

A survey for megabank Bank of America Corp. indicates that consumers of all ages are ready to embrace electronic person-to-person payments. BofA’s latest Trends in Consumer Mobility Report, released last month, found that 36% of all respondents use a P2P payments service. Market-research firm Convergys queried for the bank 1,005 …

The growth of the legal cannabis industry will force bankers and payments executives to examine the business prospects of serving that industry, according to an executive with a regional automated clearing house association. While marijuana remains illegal under federal law, 29 states have approved for it for use by adults …

• Marking an end to American Express Co.’s cobranded card losing streak, hotel chain Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. named AmEx as its exclusive credit card issuer effective Jan. 1, according to Bloomberg. AmEx and Citigroup Inc., which took over issuance of the Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded card from AmEx a year …

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