Americans and Australians are using ATMs less than they did two years ago, while British adults are the biggest and most frequent users of the machines that debuted 50 years ago in their country. But Americans are more willing than their English-speaking compatriots to pay ATM fees. Those are some …
Read More »How Online Payments Will Change, or Won’t Change, Upon Amazon’s Patent Expiration
Patents usually get the most attention when a person or company files for one, but the one held by Amazon.com Inc. for single-click buying that is set to expire Tuesday is generating plenty of buzz about how much, if at all, e-commerce will change when it’s gone. Granted by the …
Read More »Square To Apply for Bank Charter, a Move Likely To Irk Banks
Square Inc. will apply for a Utah industrial bank charter today, a move that will extend the merchant processor’s move into lending and one which could draw the opposition of banks. The bank will be capitalized with $56 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. The financial operation will be …
Read More »EMV-Accepting Merchant Locations Hit 2.3 Million in June, Visa Reports
The number of EMV chip card-accepting U.S. merchant locations reached 2.3 million in June, up from 2.02 million in March and an increase of 77% from 1.3 million in June 2016, according to new figures from Visa Inc. Visa says in its latest EMV report that half of U.S. storefronts now …
Read More »Researcher Expects Surging Cryptocurrency Transactions To Exceed $1 Trillion in 2017
Driven by higher prices and more usage, the value of cryptocurrency transactions could exceed $1 trillion this year, more than 15 times their level in 2016, a British research firm estimates. Hampshire, England-based Juniper Research in a new report pegs the value of cryptocurrency transactions in 2017’s first half at $325 …
Read More »Google Aims To Leverage Its Millions of Credit Card Credentials for Mobile Commerce
Google plans soon to give merchants access to the vast trove of credit card credentials it has in its databases to speed customer checkout for mobile and online payments. The search-engine giant, however, is not putting itself in competition with payment card networks, a Google executive said this week. The …
Read More »Payments Professionals Diagnose What Ails Mobile Wallets
There wasn’t a Regular Joe in the room, but that didn’t stop a panel of payments professionals Tuesday from probing the consumer psyche to discern why mobile wallets aren’t more popular. As a percentage of point-of-sale transactions, most experts agree that the major general-purpose mobile wallets—Apple Pay, Android Pay, and …
Read More »Seventy Percent of Millennials Have Made an In-App Purchase in the Past Year, Study Finds
Young adults are famous for their enthusiasm for new technologies, and that perception appears to be confirmed by a new study that compared adoption of in-app payments by various age groups. The recently released “2017 U.S. Mobile App Report” from Internet metrics firm comScore Inc. found that 23% of adult …
Read More »The CFPB Didn’t Play Nice, So a Judge Tosses Its Claims Against Merchant Acquirers
After chastising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for way it handled itself in its 2015 lawsuit against allegedly fraudulent debt collectors and their payment processors, a federal judge on Friday threw out the CFPB’s claims against the processors. The case is unusual in that Judge Richard W. Story of U.S. …
Read More »AmEx Exits Prepaid Card Program Management With Platform Sale to InComm
The pending sale by American Express Co. of its Serve technology platform to prepaid card program manager InComm moves AmEx more toward the model used by most other general-purpose prepaid card issuers and still keeps the upscale AmEx brand involved in a business mostly oriented toward moderate- and lower-income consumers, …
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