Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
• Payments provider Dwolla Inc. announced a $6.85 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures and Foundry Group. The funds will be used to expand sales and account-management operations at the company’s Des Moines, Iowa office. Dwolla also said it is moving its white-label products into a new collection of application …
January, 2017
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20 January
How Dwolla Turned Away from Consumer-Facing Payments to White-Label APIs
It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …
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19 January
With Help From Contactless, E-Payments Globally Could Be Taking a Bite out of Cash
The digital-payments revolution may finally be poised to relegate cash to the sidelines of finance. Worldwide, 471 billion so-called cashless transactions flowed through payments networks in 2015, a 52% increase since the end of 2011 and up 13% over 2014, according to numbers released this week by Retail Banking Research …
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19 January
Twitter Abandons its Buy Button and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Mastercard Inc. and investor and philanthropist George Soros announced plans “to explore private-sector solutions to societal challenges” by possibly creating a so-called social enterprise called Humanity Ventures that will apply commercial strategies to address such problems as joblessness and lack of access to health care and education. Soros might …
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19 January
Western Union Will Pay $586 Million to Settle Feds’ Claims of Lax Anti-Fraud Controls
The Western Union Co. will pay $586 million to the federal government to reimburse consumers victimized by fraud as a result of the company’s allegedly lax supervision of agents and anti-fraud and money-laundering controls. The settlements announced Thursday are a result of investigations that covered payments involving the smuggling of …
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19 January
Payment Options And Security Matter, But It’s Price And Shipping Costs That Kill Online Deals
Shipping costs and the total price are two primary inhibitors for consumers shopping online, found a survey from FuturePay Inc., which provides financing for online purchases. Indeed, 86% of the 1,500 consumers surveyed in the fourth quarter cited the cost of shipping as the top reason they opted not to …
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18 January
Opinions Vary Greatly About the OCC’s Proposed Fintech Bank Charter
The Electronic Transactions Association went on record Tuesday supporting the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s proposed limited-purpose national bank charter for financial technology companies, but a national trade group of small banks “expressed strong concerns” about the idea. The opinions expressed by the ETA and the Independent Community …
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18 January
ACI Makes Real-Time Connections and other Digital Transactions New briefs
• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority has accepted in principle a number of proposals Mastercard Inc. has made to dispel concerns the agency expressed earlier this month about the planned $920 million merger of Mastercard and the U.K.-based payments-technology firm VocaLink. The CMA had been concerned that the merger would hand Mastercard …
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18 January
Clearent Buying Payment Alliance International’s Merchant Services Division
Payments provider Clearent LLC is buying Payment Alliance International’s merchant-services division, which serves more than 17,000 merchants, for an undisclosed amount, Clearent announced Wednesday. The deal adds $4.2 billion in processing volume to Clearent, pushing the combined entity’s total processing volume to $14 billion and its total number of merchants …
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17 January
For Online Retailers, Holiday Sales Were Up, But So Was Attempted Fraud, Report Shows
The bill continues to come due for the frenzy of orders online merchants processed over the holidays. While card-not-present transactions were up 16% for the holiday season compared to the same period in 2015, fraud attempts increased fully 31%, according to data released Tuesday by ACI Worldwide, a Naples, Fla.-based …
