Person-to-Person Payments

The surge in popularity for peer-to-peer payments is making itself felt in the realm of holiday gifting, helping to erode a longstanding cultural taboo against giving cash during the annual gift-giving season. Gift transactions rose 47.2% in December 2017 over the monthly average for the previous August through October, according …

First Data Corp. released its Holiday Insights dashboard, which shows real-time U.S. holiday spending trends, such as total spend percentage increase, today’s most active categories with average ticket and total transactions, and regional payment volume. To date, it indicates retail spending from Thanksgiving through Black Friday increased 6.4% year-over-year. Cardfree Inc., …

PayPal Holdings Inc. has been trying to make money off of its highly popular but free peer-to-peer payments service, Venmo, but over the weekend a report emerged indicating a surge in fraud could have complicated that effort. Venmo sustained a transaction loss rate of 0.40% in March, up from 0.25% …

Payments provider SignaPay released a mobile app for Apple and Android devices called PayLo Mobile Sales to help sales agents selling the PayLo Cash Discount product. Installment-payments provider Sezzle said it raised $100 million in funding from Bastion Capital. Since launching the service more than a year ago, Sezzle says …

Ever since mobile payments first captured the public imagination four years ago with the launch of Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, experts have debated why usage of the iOS and Android wallets has fallen short of the original, lofty expectations. Some speculate that usage would rise markedly if the mobile wallets …

Boosted by its 2017 acquisition of Singular Payments, merchant processor Payment Data Systems Inc. said its credit card transactions rose 109% year-over-year in the third quarter and dollar volume rose 112%. Revenues increased 80% to $6.47 million from $3.59 million in 2017’s third quarter. The company reported a net loss of …

The e-commerce platform BigCommerce Pty Ltd. on Wednesday announced two new supported payment methods, including PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo service. With the addition of Venmo, Austin-based BigCommerce gave a big lift to PayPal’s strategy  to find revenue for what has been a fast-growing but free peer-to-peer payment service, though merchant pricing …

Shares of wire-transfer provider MoneyGram International Inc. tumbled 29% Friday morning after the company reported declining revenues and a $125 million settlement with the federal government over lax fraud controls at some agent locations. The settlement involves “allegations that the company failed to take steps required under a 2009 Federal …

Square Inc. on Wednesday played up its recent launch of an important new hardware product and celebrated what it called its first quarter of profitability under generally accepted accounting principles. While executives did not discuss sales numbers for Square Terminal, a $399 touchscreen-equipped handheld device the San Francisco-based company released …

The Zelle person-to-person payment service continued to gain traction in the third quarter. Zelle Network reported Tuesday that it processed $32 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30 on 116 million transactions. The latest figures represent a year-over-year growth rate of 67% in payment value and 83% in transactions. …