Fraud & Security

While the U.S. Department of Justice’s Operation Choke Point initiative ended last year, over-zealous efforts by other federal agencies threaten law-abiding payments companies in the same way Choke Point did, the chief executive of the Electronic Transactions Association warned Congress on Thursday. Testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on …

Mobile-authentication technology provider Payfone Inc. has raised another $23 million in a new funding round that included retail card payment services provider Synchrony Financial. The exact investment from Synchrony Ventures, Synchrony Financial’s venture-capital arm, wasn’t disclosed in Tuesday’s announcement. An undisclosed institutional investor led the funding round. In addition to …

A July 1 PCI Security Standards Council deadline is prompting payments providers to act well before then, with many establishing their own compliance deadlines in February. What has provoked this eagerness? It could be that noncompliance with the PCI mandate could halt merchant transactions that rely on the Internet. The …

Criminals target signature-based debit cards for fraud attempts far more than any other payment method, according to new findings from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Fed’s survey last summer, which garnered responses from 283 banks and credit unions across the country, found that more than 90% of …

Thanks to the seemingly unending epidemic of data breaches—capped by the huge breach last summer at credit-reporting titan Equifax Inc.—consumers are becoming both more aware and more cynical about the problem, according to research released Tuesday by Javelin Strategy & Research. In the wake of the Equifax case, in which …

Federal regulatory initiatives targeting the payments industry may have abated, but a variety of others at the state level and in the court system could require reactions from payments providers. That’s the word from Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs, who spoke Wednesday at the annual Northeast Acquirers …

PayPal Holdings Inc.’s stock was trading down about 7.5% as of mid-morning Thursday, hours after an announcement from eBay Inc. that the big marketplace will shift transaction processing from long-time provider PayPal to Netherlands-based processor Adyen. EBay’s business accounts for about 13% of PayPal’s volume, a share PayPal said Thursday …

Banks and credit unions across the board are increasing deposit limits for mobile remote deposit capture transactions, and with the consumer remote-capture market mostly conquered, financial institutions are turning their attention to small businesses. Those are two highlights from RemoteDepositCapture.com’s 2017 study of the mobile-capture market. The Alpharetta, Ga.-based publishing …

The U.S. Payments Forum on Monday reported that the vast majority of large U.S. merchants now accept EMV chip cards. With the conversion to chip from the old magnetic-stripe payment technology at the point of sale now over the hump, though still far from complete, advocates are looking at fuel …

The U.S. Secret Service began warning financial institutions last week about ATM “jackpotting,” in which a machine quickly spits out huge amounts of cash after being physically compromised by organized gangs and infected with a variant of malware first seen in 2013, according to KrebsOnSecurity. Hackers are especially targeting Diebold …