Issuing/Originating

Small businesses in Canada will reap lower interchange rates in that country, the Department of Finance Canada announced Thursday. The deal suggests a similar reduction is possible in the United States, the Merchant Payments Coalition quickly responded. Both Mastercard Inc. and Visa Inc. agreed to lower the domestic consumer credit …

Marathon Digital Holdings Inc., a digital-asset company that supports the Bitcoin ecosystem, is teaming up with Brink Technology to raise $1 million to support Bitcoin Core developers that maintain the Bitcoin protocol. Brink Technology works to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol and network. The Bitcoin protocol enables Bitcoin to function as …

Blockchain company Ripple unveiled its Ripple CBDC Platform, technology supporting central banks, governments, and financial institutions in issuing central bank digital currencies. More than 90% of the world’s countries are at some stage of development toward a CBDC, according to the Atlantic Council. Matera, a U.S.-based instant payment and QR code technology …

Sezzle is fine-tuning the buy now, pay later experience with the debut of its Pay-in-2 product. Just as its name suggests, the new product splits transactions into two payments, which can help expand BNPL to new categories, such as grocery, monthly subscriptions, and other high-frequency categories, Sezzle says. Consumers choosing …

Fifth Third Bancorp said it has closed on its acquisition of Big Data LLC, a technology platform for health-care payments. Terms were not disclosed Mark Barnett, president of Mastercard Inc. for Europe, said card interchange “represents incredibly good value” with respect to “sharing the costs and benefits of the payment system.” The remarks …

Online merchants today are faced with a difficult dilemma. They often operate with limited resources, which is especially true for independent retailers with smaller budgets. To expand their businesses, these merchants must carefully manage their financial and human resources, especially in the highly competitive world of e-commerce. So, here’s a …

ABI Research forecasted the number of physical, instantly issued payment cards globally will grow to 471.1 million shipments in 2027 from 243.2 million in 2022. Citicorp’s Citi Retail Services unit introduced its Citi Pay line of services, with the first product consisting of Citi Pay Credit, a digital credit card. An installment-loan product will …

Real-time payment fraud is on the rise, even before the expected July launch of the Federal Reserve’s FedNow service. Some 71% of financial institutions reported an increase in consumer account takeover fraud using real-time payment networks from 2021 to 2022, according to a February and March survey of financial-institution executives internationally …

EMTransfer LLC, a real-estate cash-management platform provider, has teamed up with KeyBank to bring real-time payments to the real-estate industry through The Clearing House Payments Co.’s RTP network. Using application programming interfaces from KeyBank, EMTransfer can connect parties involved in the real-estate closing process, such as title insurance and escrow …

Payrange Inc., a payments provider for the vending and unattended-retail market, announced it has acquired Vagabond, a cloud-based provider of business intelligence for the convenience-retail industry. Terms were not announced. Sales of contactless cards helped payment card manufacturer CPI Card Group Inc. increase overall first-quarter sales 8% year-over-year to $120.9 million, with sales …