News

June, 2017

• 6 June

  Gift Cards Are Growing Again, Reaching Almost $134 Billion in Loads Last Year

  

  Gift cards issued by retailers are heating up, according to the latest research from Mercator Advisory Group. Total loads grew 6% in 2016 to reach $133.9 billion, Mercator’s Ben Jackson tells Digital Transactions News. That performance follows a decline in loads the year before. The research, which covers closed-loop gift …
• 5 June

  Eleven States—But Not the DoJ—Ask the Supreme Court to Review AmEx Steering Case

  

  By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A landmark anti-steering case against American Express Co. is going to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorneys general from 11 states have asked the high court to review a decision handed down in September by a federal appeals court that upheld AmEx’s policy of banning merchants from
• 5 June

  EMV Accounts for More Than Half of Major-Brand U.S. Cards, New EMVCo Figures Show

  

  By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews The U.S. transition to the EMV chip card standard has been a long and troubled road, but statistics released by the international standards body behind EMV indicate encouraging progress. As of the end of 2016, 52.2% of major-brand payment cards in the United States—some 675 million …
• 5 June

  M-Payment Laundry App Debuts and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • Washlava, a startup focusing on self-service laundromats, release its mobile app that enables users to reserve an LG Giant commercial washing machine and pay for the use via the app after tapping the phone against the machine. • Vending-payments specialist USA Technologies Inc. said the amount of contactless payments for laundry …
• 5 June

  Confirming Months of Rumors, Apple Announces a P2P Service Tied to Apple Pay And iMessage

  

  Payments observers have expected Apple Inc. to add person-to-person payments to its Apple Pay mobile-payments service for almost as long as the mobile wallet has been available, and on Monday, the computing giant obliged. Without adding much detail, Apple announced that users of its iMessage feature will be able to …
• 2 June

  Eye on Security: Data Breaches up 35%; Malware Hits Kmart

  

  By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews The number of data breaches tracked by the Identity Theft Resource Center in 2017 hit 698 as of May 30, a 35.3% increase over the record pace of a year ago when the ITRC flagged 516 breaches in 2016’s first five months. The San Diego-based nonprofit monitors …
• 2 June

  EDGE, a Universal Card Service, Eyes Coin Users and other Digital Transactions News briefs

  • EDGE Mobile Payments LLC, which offers a card-consolidation device, said it is offering users of the former Coin card a discount on the purchase of its EDGE Card. Fitbit Inc. purchased Coin in 2016, and the service was shuttered earlier this year. • PayPal Holdings Inc.’s dominance in e-commerce payments …
• 2 June

  In Yet Another ISV Play, GTCR Buys Sage Payment Solutions for $260 Million

  

  Finally, the rumors can stop. Sage Payment Solutions, the U.S. merchant-services arm of Sage Group plc, has been sold to GTCR LLC, a Chicago-based private-equity firm, for $260 million, GTCR announced Friday. Reports of a possible sale of the company, which counts approximately 100,000 merchants in its portfolio, originally surfaced …
• 1 June

  Payment Regulations Aren’t Keeping Payments Safe

  

  There are several reasons why you can’t rely on law and regulation, says Ed Adshead-Grant. Here’s where they fall short and what you should do about it. Initiatives like open banking and faster payments have ushered in a whole new era in the world of business-to-business payments. The industry is …
• 1 June

  First Data’s New Fraud-Detection Tool Features Real-Time Algorithm Updating

  

  First Data Corp. is hoping that its scale—it says it processes more than 2,800 transactions per second coming from more than 6 million merchants—will give its new Fraud Detect service an edge in thwarting fraudulent transactions. Announced Thursday, Fraud Detect uses artificial intelligence and machine learning, fraud scoring, cybersecurity intelligence, …