Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The conversion of U.S. payment cards from the aging magnetic stripe to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard will hardly be a seamless transition. That’s the word from a payments researcher and Canadian retail experts who spoke on a panel at a payments conference Tuesday near Chicago. The warnings came a …
Read More »How Smoothie King’s King-Size iPad Play Could Open the Gates for Tablet POS
In what appears to be the largest tablet-based point-of-sale deployment yet, the entire 700-store Smoothie King Franchises Inc. chain will convert to a system from San Francisco-based Revel Systems Inc. The Covington, La.-based chain, which sells blended drinks, snacks, and supplements, is replacing existing checkout registers with Apple iPads linked …
Read More »Apple Pay: No Charge for Merchants, But Transaction-Security Fees for Issuers
Apple Inc.’s introduction of its new Apple Pay service for its soon-to-be released iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch raised a huge number of questions in the payments industry. One of the biggest topics of speculation is just how is Apple going to make money from the service, with combines …
Read More »Accepting Only Digital Money, Bitcoin Shop Overhauls Its Online Marketplace
Bitcoin Shop Inc. runs an e-commerce marketplace offering about 140,000 products, which on the face of it isn’t all that remarkable. What sets the 1-year-old site apart, though, is that it accepts only digital currency. No cards or bank-account transfers, please, just Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. But Arlington, Va.-based Bitcoin …
Read More »The U.S. EMV Migration Produces a Windfall for POS Terminal Producer VeriFone
It’s a good time to be a point-of-sale terminal maker when all of your customers have to go through the payments equivalent of abandoning the horse and buggy and jumping into an automobile. With a major U.S. deadline for converting from magnetic-stripe payment cards to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card …
Read More »Home Depot Hires Data-Security Firms As Other Merchants Contend With Breaches
Big box hardware retailer The Home Depot Inc. has hired two data-security firms to delve into its point-of-sale systems to determine the extent of a possible breach first reported on Tuesday. Security site KrebsOnSecurity.com said then that several banks it contacted said they saw evidence that Home Depot stores …
Read More »Looking To Expand Beyond Digital Markets, Boku Gets a Read on Magazine Subscriptions
Ever since the carrier-billing model for mobile payments found a foothold in the digital-goods market several years ago, processors have tested various tactics to broaden the range of goods the model could be applied to. The latest example is San Francisco-based Boku Inc. and its announcement Thursday that it will …
Read More »Mobile, POS Payments-Tech M&A Drives Overall Tech Deals to New Global Highs
Deals for financial and payments technology companies drove worldwide merger-and-acquisition activity in the technology sector to new highs in the second quarter, according to a report released on Thursday. n Transactions for payments and financial technologies firms was especially heavy in the second quarter. The quarter’s 60 deals exceeded the …
Read More »Square Attempts to Quell Some of Amazon’s Thunder With Post Dispelling ‘Myths’
In a recent blog post, Square Inc. is attempting to counter some of the attention foisted on Amazon.com Inc. after the announcement last week of Local Register, the online retailer’s mobile point-of-sale service, by dispelling the “top 10 myths” about Square’s service. Local Register enables retailers to accept payment …
Read More »Change Is Coming for Agents as Merchants’ Payment Products Evolve
Sales agents as a way to sell payment-processing services to merchants aren’t going away, but they aren’t staying the same. That’s according to a new research report from Double Diamond Group LLC, a Centennial, Colo.-based payments-advisory firm. “This is a period of significant change in acquiring,” says Rick Oglesby, …
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