Competitive Strategies

• Braintree launched Braintree Auth as an invitation-only service in beta. The service streamlines integration of Braintree merchants with e-commerce platforms and eases the way for new payment methods enabled by Braintree, a unit of PayPal Holdings Inc. Braintree Auth currently processes payments on e-commerce platforms Bigcommerce, WooCommerce, and 3DCart. …

The U.S. payments industry is keeping a watchful eye on friendly-fraud chargebacks now that the EMV liability shift is in effect. According to software enterprise CA Technologies, global card-not-present fraud by 2018 will be at least double the $2.9 billion logged in 2014. Fraudulent chargebacks, always a risk for sellers, …

• The Federal Reserve picked consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to support its Faster Payments Task Force efforts this year by assessing solution proposals from various payments providers. • Merchant processor Square Inc. announced its “Build With Square,” a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrates point-of-sale and-online payments capabilities with …

• Nearly half—48%—of ATM operators did not have EMV acceptance enabled on their machines at the end of 2015, finds the 2016 ATM Channel EMV Readiness Survey released by the ATM Industry Association. Fourteen months ago, the survey predicted that figure would be 12%. Continuing uncertainty and confusion, routing issues, and …

There’s no turning back from the mobile phenomenon for financial transactions as a new survey finds that 41% of consumers use their smart phones to make bank transactions, such as person-to-person payments, paying bills, and making check deposits, up from 36% in 2014, says consultancy Mercator Advisory Group Inc. While …

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s shares took a hit last week when a media report said Apple Inc. plans to launch a mobile-browser version of its Apple Pay service, potentially making Apple Pay a stronger competitor to the online and mobile-payments leader. But a payments analyst says any new competition from Apple …

Once widely disparaged as an unwieldy fraud solution, 3-D Secure is back on the radar screens of risk managers at major online merchants and card issuers. Improvements in the 15-year-old technology, combined with surging e-commerce fraud, are driving the renewed interest, experts say. “Two-and-a-half years ago, zero U.S. online merchants …

Acquirers and financial institutions can put consumer and merchant affinity for smart phones to work for them when trying to comply with anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer regulations. Smart-phone activity, whether it’s purchasing behavior, location habits, or personally identifiable information associated with the wireless carrier account, can be used to vet the …

Industry efforts to persuade consumers to use credit and debit cards for small-ticket purchases may be paying off, at least among younger consumers, finds a survey from CreditCards.com, a card comparison site for consumers. In the survey of more than 600 U.S. adult credit card holders sampled in early March, …

If consumers wanted a mobile wallet in 2013 and 2014, they wanted it from their primary financial institution. But things changed in 2015, when PayPal and Visa surpassed banks and credit unions as preferred wallet providers. That’s the bad news for financial institutions in a new report about mobile wallets …