Toast Inc. has signed Ascent Hospitality Management, which owns and manages the Perkins American Food Co. and Huddle House restaurant chains, as a client. Ascent will install Toast’s payments platform in 500 Perkins and Huddle House locations initially. Ascent installed the first Toast platform at a Perkins location last fall, the …

Now Book It, a vendor of table-reservation and payments software for restaurants in Australia and New Zealand, has expanded to Canada. Canada has more than 100,000 locations that serve food, such as restaurants, cafés and brew pubs, generating $112 billion in annual sales, according to Restaurants Canada. In addition, 23 …

Fraud-as-a-service offerings last year made it easier than ever for criminals to perpetrate mega-fraud attacks across payment, social media, and cryptocurrency platforms, says a report from AU10TIX, a provider of identity-verification solutions. Fraud-as-a-service refers to online marketplaces that sell the tools criminals need to perpetrate fraud, such as artificial-intelligence-based tools …

Stripe Inc. announced late Wednesday it is partnering with Spade, a provider of real-time merchant intelligence for card issuers, to provide issuers on the Stripe platform with data to verify a merchant’s identity during the authorization process. Spade provides information such as merchant name, category, and geolocation within 50 milliseconds. …

Zelle, the peer-to-peer payments service from Early Warning Services LLC, announced early Wednesday that dollar volume sent over the network last year totaled a record $1 trillion, up 27% from 2023. Transactions for the year totaled 3.6 billion, a 25% year-over-year increase, while the number of consumer and business accounts …

A subdued Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is likely to emerge in the wake of the order issued over the weekend to close its offices for the week and have employees work remotely during that period. Acting CFPB director Russell Vought, director of the United States Office of Management and Budget, …

BNY, formerly the Bank of New York Mellon Corp., early on Monday completed a $10 million transaction over the RTP Network, a record payment for the instant-payments system, which launched in 2017. The transaction, an inter-company liquidity-management payment from BNY client Computershare to an account at another financial institution, is …

U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Kendell extended the injunction against Illinois’s pending interchange law late Thursday to include more financial institutions but stopped short of providing blanket relief from the law for all financial institutions and the card networks. Kendall, a judge in the Northern District of Illinois, ruled that …

Evolv Inc. has partnered with United Bankers Bank to provide a merchant-services program to UBB’s community-bank customers. The deal is expected to advance innovative payment solutions across the financial institutions served by United Bakers Bank, according to Evolv and UBB. The services will make up a “concierge-style, white-glove” merchant-services program …

Thanks to criminals’ increasing adoption of artificial intelligence, cyberfraud rose 14% in 2024, according to a report from Trustpair, a provider of fraud-prevention technology. Overall, 90% of U.S. companies were targeted by cyber fraud the past year, compared to 79% in 2023. The increase is being driven by criminals’ use …