Law and Regulation

A federal judge has ordered the two main perpetrators of what the Federal Trade Commission calls the “massive Pointbreak Media robocall scheme,” part of which involved remotely created checks, to pay $3.37 million to the FTC, the agency announced this week. U.S. District Court Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga in Miami …

Processor Adyen N.V. said ride-share service Uber will use Adyen’s 3-D Secure service online and in-app. 3-D Secure is an online authentication standard that, now in its second iteration, uses multiple bits of data to verify elements of a transaction. Unlike the first version, 3-D Secure 2 aims to be …

POSaBIT, a point-of-sale services provider for cannabis retailers, said an analysis of “hundreds of thousands” of transactions at more than 120 California, Washington, and Colorado stores found that consumers belonging to a cannabis retailer’s loyalty rewards program had a 28% higher average ticket value and visited the store more frequently …

Transaction and dollar volume for Priority Technology Holdings Inc. managed to grow in the first quarter despite the downsizing of the merchant processor’s formerly large online subscription-billing business. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Priority reported Monday that merchant bank card processing volume rose 8.8% to $9.9 billion versus $9.1 billion in 2018’s first …

Will it or won’t it? Those eagerly awaiting word about whether the Federal Reserve will directly operate a real-time gross settlement system will have to wait a bit longer. The Fed last October said it was considering whether to directly develop and operate a RTGS system as an outgrowth of …

Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on Tuesday said it expects to close its colossal $43 billion acquisition of payment processor Worldpay Inc. in the third quarter following a Federal Trade Commission ruling. The merger, announced in March, would create a processing colossus with payments services ranging from merchant processing, …

Former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Robert O. Carr has agreed to pay a $250,628 civil penalty to settle an insider-trading complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to court documents filed this week. Carr did not admit or deny the SEC’s allegations, according to filings in …

In advance of a key European regulation taking effect late this summer, San Francisco-based payments provider Stripe Inc. has acquired Touchtech Payments, a developer of authentication software. Terms of the deal, announced Wednesday, were not disclosed. Founded in 2014, Dublin-based Touchtech specializes in code that establishes customer identities for financial …

A federal judge has banned payments provider Priority Payout Corp. and its owner Thomas Wells from ever directly or indirectly working in the payment-processing industry following a violation of a 2009 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. Announced last week, the ban, ordered by U.S. District Court Judge James C. …

A prominent merchant group says that in the face of declining authorization, clearing, and settlement costs, it is time for the Federal Reserve to lower its regulated debit card interchange rate. The Retail Industry Leaders Association issued its call after the Fed last month released its latest bi-annual study of …