Issuing/Originating

The pandemic has sparked a huge lift in online gift card sales as consumers make shopping for the plastic part of their e-commerce routine. The number of cards purchased online soared 57% in the first six months of this year compared to the first half of 2019. Some 52% of …

Fanatics, a retailer selling sports merchandise, is one of the first merchants to sign up for a point-of-sale installment payment service from Fiserv Inc. and QuadPay.Lightspeed POS Inc. made its shares available for purchase in the United States. The Canadian point-of-sale system developer also filed its application to list its shares …

Debit card spending increased 9.4% for the week ending Aug. 30 from the week ending Sept. 1, 2019, for credit unions working with PSCU, a credit union service organization. For the same period, credit card spending was down 2.5%. Mobile wallet use with a debit card increased 68% and those with …

In the nearly four months since it underwent a major downgrade in the incentive it offers miners, Bitcoin has seen its price rise nicely, but holders of the digital currency have not yet, at least, witnessed the wild upswing that followed the last such adjustment. Bitcoin was trading at $10,483 …

The data networks that connect payments and other financial apps to users’ bank accounts are scrambling to standardize data access by moving to application programming interfaces and away from an older, cruder form of access known in the business as “screen scraping.” The effort comes as financial apps gain popularity …

Count transactional credit at the point of sale among the payment technologies winning more of the spotlight as consumers tentatively venture out and businesses reopen in the midst of Covid-19’s impact. Mastercard Inc. on Wednesday announced new integrations with the card-issuing processor TSYS and with technology providers that will let …

Shift4 Payments Inc. will provide tokenization, gateway, and end-to-end payment processing for a digital-commerce platform from Sionic Mobile Corp., according to a joint announcement from the companies. The initial focus is on restaurants, including services for online ordering and existing mobile payment and loyalty apps.Fiserv Inc. announced that starting Tuesday consumers with Alexa-enabled cars or …

Online volume has soared for Klarna AB but the Swedish payments company’s efforts to go into physical stores are also bearing fruit, the company reported early Thursday. Klarna, which offers consumers the opportunity at checkout to extend payments over time, reported its “in-store proposition” is now active in 10 geographic …

Refused transactions are frustrating enough for cardholders and merchants, but during a pandemic they could be especially nerve-wracking. Visa Inc. on Wednesday announced a new service for stand-in processing that the payments network says should yield faster and more accurate results when issuers’ systems are down. The new Smarter STIP …

With underbanked consumers and gig workers looking for financial products to help them track spending, create savings, and manage debt, many financial-technology companies are layering debit products onto their core application to attract and retain customers. A driving force behind fintechs’ growing fondness for debit is that it is a …