Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
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, …
December, 2017
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11 December
Chicago Transit Authority To End Issuance of Open-Loop Fare Cards
The Chicago Transit Authority, an early proponent of open-loop fare payments, announced Monday that the general-purpose payment feature in some of its fare cards will expire Dec. 31. The operator of the nation’s second-largest transit system says riders did not embrace the idea of a CTA-provided general-purpose prepaid account coupled …
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11 December
AmEx Says It Will End Its Signature Requirement, Leaving Visa As the Last U.S. Holdout
American Express Co. on Monday became the third of the four major U.S. card brands to announce it will cease requiring signatures for transactions made with its cards at the point of sale beginning in April 2018. AmEx says its rule change applies to all point-of-sale purchase transactions globally, a …
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11 December
Fed Names Payments Security Leader and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 12/11/17
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, …
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11 December
COMMENTARY: Instant Check Cashing Earns Customers And Grows Revenue
The reasons why consumers hate checks are numerous: waiting for a check to arrive in the mail, finding an institution to deposit it, waiting another three to five days for funds to clear, then fearing it might bounce. Nearly everyone would agree that it’s an antiquated process filled with stress …
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8 December
Bitcoin’s Fast Rise Has Investors Giddy But Obscures a New Solution for Network Growth
Bitcoin’s heady rise this year has pleased investors and drawn the attention of derivatives exchanges and other institutional players, but it may also have obscured a development going on behind the scenes to solve one of the digital currency’s biggest drawbacks: its weakness as a payment method. Bitcoin, which started …
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8 December
Consumers Using More Revolving Credit and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 12/8/17
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 …
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7 December
Cardless ATM Use Advances With Bank’s Deployment of Mastercard’s Cash Pick-Up Service
The evolution of ATMs away from strictly card-based usage and toward mobile devices advanced Thursday when Fort Lee, N.J.-based Cross River Bank reported that it is the first bank to offer Mastercard Inc.’s Cash Pick-Up service. The service, which Mastercard announced in September, enables so-called underbanked or unbanked consumers to …
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7 December
How Should a Global Network Be Governed? An Answer from AmEx’s Chenault Sparks Debate
Whether he intended to or not, Ken Chenault may well have touched off a debate about what constitutes the ideal governance structure for a global payments network. Chenault, who will retire early next year as chairman and chief executive of American Express Co., charged this week that his two big …
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7 December
BitPay Raises $30 Million and other Digital Transactions News briefs from 12/7/17
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 …