Digital Currency

Distributed-ledger payments provider Ripple Labs on Thursday announced three cryptocurrency exchanges that will work with its xRapid cross-border payments product. XRapid uses Ripple’s XRP digital currency and depends on exchanges to translate transactions into local fiat currencies. San Francisco-based Ripple said it is partnering with Bittrex for exchanges to U.S. …

Don’t look for many optimists in the payments industry when it comes to a future with less fraud. Fully 84% of those surveyed by TD Bank say payments fraud will become a bigger threat over the next one to two years. Released Tuesday, the survey, conducted this spring at the …

Users of Square Inc.’s Cash App can now buy and sell Bitcoin in all states, according to a tweet the company sent at mid-day Monday. The Bitcoin capability, which Square introduced in November as a pilot, is hardly a major business for the San Francisco-based payments company, but it is starting …

Point-of-sale system provider POSaBIT Inc. announced nine stores of the Starbuds recreational marijuana-dispensary chain will use its POS system. Though POSaBIT, in its press release, did not disclose specifically which payments Starbuds will accept via the POS system, its Web site lists debit card and cryptocurrency acceptance as alternatives to …

The FBI privately warned banks on Friday that cybercriminals are preparing a big “ATM cashout” operation, a choreographed global scheme in which fraudsters hack a bank or payment processor, plant malware that attempts to disable banks’ ATM withdrawal limits and related transaction controls, and use cloned payment cards to withdraw potentially …

Bitcoin’s volatility may have dampened the payments industry’s enthusiasm for the cryptocurrency, but payments players are now reaping patent awards for Bitcoin-related inventions they filed years ago. The latest example is Intuit Inc., the Mountain View, Calif.-based company behind the popular Quicken and QuickBooks accounting programs for consumers and small …

Citing data from the global payment card networks, the U.S. Payments Forum reported in its latest update on the conversion from magnetic-stripe to EMV chip card payments that approximately 57% of in-store card transactions are now “chip-on-chip,” meaning an EMV point-of-sale terminal read an EMV card. Also, acceptance of contact …

One year after the hard fork that created it, Bitcoin Cash is in some ways mimicking the digital currency it was spawned from. Bitcoin Cash’s price at $693 Monday morning has slid by about $1,000 in the past three months, according to CoinMarketCap.com. And it’s well under the $4,091 peak …

USA Technologies Inc. said Pepsi Bottling Ventures (PBV) has signed a multiyear contract for USAT’s ePort Connect contactless-payment technology covering 13,000 vending machines. PBV is said to be the largest privately held bottler for Pepsi products in North America. NuData Security, a unit of Mastercard Inc., released a service to …

Joe Kaplan, the chief executive of merchant processor Paya and former president of the Electronic Transactions Association’s board of directors, died unexpectedly last week, the ETA announced. Kaplan was the former CEO of Total Merchant Services and founded Innovative Merchant Solutions, which he sold to Intuit Inc. in 2003 and …