Payments startup Dwolla Corp. eliminated its transaction fee last week on all payments under $10, a bold move in itself, but it apparently has much bigger things in store. For one thing, the Des Moines, Iowa-based company is testing a system that co-founder Ben Milne says will make automated …
Read More »Xoom Launches a Mobile Site to Further Streamline Online Remittances
n While the mobile service just launched, early results have been “overwhelmingly positive,” says Julian King, Xoom’s senior vice president of marketing and corporate development. “Out customer base is delighted, but it’s super early.” The new service relies on technology from mobile-commerce vendor Usablenet Inc., New York. n The …
Read More »Payment Firms’ Returns Belie the Economic Gloom
Shadows darken the recent economic news, but early third-quarter reports from payments-industry companies paint a much sunnier picture. The big card-issuer and merchant processor Total System Services Inc., for instance, on Tuesday said it was increasing its dividend by 43%, its first dividend increase in five years. Last week, Visa …
Read More »PayPal’s Slick New NFC-Based P2P Tech Could Be Prelude to POS Play
PayPal Inc. this week demonstrated its slick new person-to-person payments option for Android smart phones equipped with near-field communication (NFC) technology. The demo gave birth to a crop of headlines in online tech publications, but the new service may be little more than a prelude to bigger things PayPal …
Read More »With $5 Million Round, Mobibucks Is Latest NFC Alternative to Draw Investors
While point-of-sale payments using near-field communication (NFC) technology appear to be drawing closer, systems that let consumers make mobile payments in stores without NFC are drawing investor interest. This week, Mobibucks, a Louisville, Ky.-based startup, announced a $5 million Series A funding round led by Acadia Woods Partners. The …
Read More »In a P2P Play, Fiserv Snaps up CashEdge for $465 Million in Cash
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Read More »AmEx To Beef up Marketing for Serve in Wake of Promising Pilot Results
American Express Co. will step up marketing of its Serve digital payment system early in the third quarter, following encouraging results from a pilot in Eugene, Ore., says David Messenger, executive vice president of online and mobile, American Express. “We’ve done a market test in Eugene and got some …
Read More »The New BofA-Wells-Chase P2P Service Courts Potential Partners
The bubbling person-to-person payments market boiled over Wednesday when mega banks Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. announced a joint P2P service dubbed clearXchange. While currently limited to the banks’ customers, clearXchange could be integrated with other P2P systems, and possibly even become …
Read More »Visa Announces an E-Wallet for Mobile, E-Commerce, and POS Transactions
n Visa Inc. announced on Wednesday a digital wallet aimed at increasing its share of transactions in mobile payments, e-commerce, and at the point of sale. n The digital wallet will store all the payment cards in a consumer’s wallet, including non-Visa branded cards, Jim McCarthy, Visa's head of global …
Read More »Aiming to Boost Its Position with Cardholders, Discover Launches a P2P Service with PayPal
Once avoided as a money-loser, person-to-person payments are picking up momentum, with Discover Financial Services as the latest entrant. Discover’s Money Messenger service, which went live Monday, allows cardholders to send cash to anyone with a PayPal account. Recipients who aren’t PayPal customers can set up an account quickly via …
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