Fraud & Security

Mastercard Inc. said it will acquire Ekata, a digital identity services company, for $850 million. Ekata helps identify good customers and businesses and bad actors in real time, it said. Ekata, formerly the business-to-business unit of Whitepages Pro, spun off in 2019 and adopted the new name. The deal is expected …

On its first day of trading as a public company, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc. saw its stock finish at $328.28 per share after starting the day at $381 and rising as high as $429.54 on the Nasdaq. The day’s activity left Coinbase with a valuation of $85 billion on a diluted basis, making …

With the deadline for EMV-at-the-pump compliance up to four days away—and with a shortage of installation technicians slowing compliance—Sound Payments Petro Solutions, a provider of technology solutions for the petroleum industry, announced Monday it is partnering with fuel-dispenser parts specialist Freedom Electronics to provide preconfigured EMV retrofit kits to simplify …

Cybersecurity provider RSA said payment transaction volume using 3-D Secure increased 73% globally in 2020 over 2019 in its RSA Quarterly Fraud report for the 2021 first quarter.The payments provider FreedomPay said the Foot Locker Inc. chain has installed its payments system across Foot Locker’s more than 2,000 U.S. stores.Workflow-automation company DocuPhase announced it has acquired …

While account takeover is a major concern for financial institutions and merchants, many underestimate the cost as well as the frequency of attacks, says a report released Thursday by Arkose Labs, a San Francisco-based provider of fraud-prevention technology. Indeed, one of the costliest aspects of account takeovers is the loss of …

Square Inc. entered the acquiring market in Ireland with its Early Access Program, which offers small and medium-size merchants what the company calls exclusive access to Square technology. Square expects to launch its technology generally in Ireland later this year.Transact Holdings Inc., a specialist in payments technology for college campuses, said …

“We are looking very carefully at the question of whether we should issue a digital dollar,” said Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell in testimony before the Senate banking committee. “We are the world’s reserve currency and we have a responsibility to get this right.” As digital currency moves from the …

In 2020, 74% of organizations were targets of payments fraud, down from 81% in 2019 and 82% 2018, according to the Association for Financial Professionals’ annual fraud report. The Bethesda, Md.-based association has surveyed companies across myriad industries yearly for 17 years. Large organizations, those with annual revenue of $1 …

Contactless-technology provider Loop Insights Inc. announced it has integrated its service with an application programming interface for billing from point-of-sale technology provider Vend Ltd. The integration enables onboarding of Vend merchants to Loop’s compliance and reporting platform. Processor Lightspeed POS Inc. last month agreed to acquire Vend in a deal valued at $350 million. …

Card-based biometric authentication took a step forward with an announcement early Wednesday that a technology from Fingerprint Cards AB has complied with reference specifications set by Mastercard Inc. The compliance is a first for fingerprint authentication on a card, according to Sweden-based Fingerprints and Fime, an organization that consults on …