E-Commerce

As shopping and commerce gear up for an online horde of AI agents equipped to seek out and buy products, doubts are starting to emerge regarding how much discretion should be extended to those bits of code. In the latest development, research emerged early Wednesday indicating consumers using AI agents …

American Water, said to be the largest regulated water and wastewater utility in the U.S., has adopted VXconnect from software developer VertexOne. VXconnect offers a mobile app by which customers can manage payments. Toast announced it has signed Kung Fu Tea for point-of-sale payments processing and related technology. Kung Fu Tea operates 330 …

In an ideal world, a report about the low costs of personally identifiable data that can be stitched together to create a synthetic identity, a proverbial Frankenstein, would be nonexistent. That’s not the world today, however. A new report from Coveron, an identity-theft protection service, outlines how cheap it is …

Payments processor Talus launched ReadyPoint, an offering that allows merchants to accept payments on mobile phones through softPOS tap-to-pay technology from Ingenico. A new report from Visa Inc., called “The Great Indoors: How the ‘Couch Economy’ Is Redefining Consumer Spending Habits,” found that more than 17% of payment cards are used for streaming …

As spending enabled by stablecoins picks up momentum, payments players are beginning to see a need to guard against agentic transaction fraud involving cryptocurrency as the medium of exchange. The latest example of this unfolding concern emerged Thursday. Contending that “blockchain analytics was built for a pre-agentic world,” London-based risk-management …

MoneyGram launched its MoneyGram Card, a Visa-branded card backed by stablecoins and developed in partnership with Rain, a provider of stablecoin services. The card is available now in Colombia, with plans to launch in other markets over coming months. Flex Dental Solutions said its FlexPayments service will offer buy now, pay later …

Having launched Mastercard Agent Suite in January, the card brand is expanding the service to make it easier for merchants to create and deploy AI-enabled shopping experiences. It also is launching Mastercard Agent Connect, a service that helps merchants, AI agents, platforms, and payment providers connect and transact via a …

Checkout.com launched direct acquiring in the United States under its Merchant Acquirer Limited Purpose Bank charter in Georgia. Mastercard Inc. announced Mastercard Wallet Pay, a set of technologies enabling interoperability and encouraging innovation among wallets for contactless and online payments. Some 4.3 billion persons globally now use digital wallets, a number expected …