Debit Cards

Seven months after paying $260 million for Sage Payment Solutions, the U.S. merchant-services arm of Sage Group plc, investment firm GTCR LLC is giving it a new name—Paya—and a refreshed strategy to add more merchants to its portfolio. Announced Tuesday, the Paya name for the Reston, Va.-based payments provider signifies a …

Investors gave Starbucks Corp. the cold shoulder Friday morning on news that despite a record $6.1 billion in quarterly revenues, growth is slowing in the United States. But the coffee giant’s payments business has several initiatives brewing, executives reported late Thursday. A leader in closed-loop prepaid cards and mobile payments …

Last year was a year of revival for Discover Financial Services’ long-suffering Pulse debit network, which posted a 19% fourth-quarter increase in year-over-year dollar volume on 15% more transactions. The strong finish—$42.4 billion in volume on 1.03 billion transactions—brought Pulse’s full-year volume to $157.1 billion, up 14% from $138 billion …

Fraud-prevention specialist Tender Armor LLC intends to use the proceeds from its latest funding round to hire more personnel and launch its marketing efforts. Announced Thursday, the funding round, for an unspecified amount (though characterized as “multimillion”), is a big step in growing the startup, says Madeline K. Aufseeser, chief …

For decades, merchants have had to install specially designed and built devices to allow customers to enter their personal identification numbers for debit card payments. And lately, that has been the case for EMV cards, as well. But on Wednesday, that changed as the PCI Security Standards Council published a …

About a year later than it intended, Amazon.com Inc. on Monday opened to the public an 1,800-square-foot convenience store in Seattle that promises to streamline physical shopping and payment as the company has for decades smoothed out the wrinkles in e-commerce. Along with Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition last year of …

With the merger between Vantiv Inc. and Worldpay plc finalized, the combined organization, known as Worldpay Inc., will get to the tasks at hand, says Shane Happach, Worldpay executive vice president and head of its global enterprise e-commerce. Chief among them will be developing its technology and growing the company, …

Financial-services providers experienced a 105% increase in the fraudster attack rate from 2015 through 2017, reports ThreatMetrix Inc., an authentication and fraud-mitigation provider, in its “Cybercrime Report 2017: A Year in Review,” released on Tuesday. E-commerce merchants, too, experienced greater fraud, with the log-in attack rate growing by 170% from …

When major technology companies started launching mobile-payments services a few years ago, many observers figured digitized and tokenized card credentials would soon replace old-fashioned plastic. But now, the chronically sluggish adoption and usage rates these mobile wallets have registered is lending new life to plastic cards. The twist is that …

Visa Inc.’s announcement Friday that it will make signature authentication optional for EMV contact and contactless transactions in North America starting in April might provide another boost for merchants who have yet to adopt chip-card acceptance, suggests an analyst. Signatures remain a requirement for Visa magnetic stripe-based transactions not subject to …