Transaction Processing

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

Independent sales organizations and merchant-services salespeople considering selling all or part of their merchant portfolios have to consider more than finding the right buyer, said a panel of acquiring specialists. While some portfolio valuations might spike as high as the 40s—referring to a multiple of the net monthly processing revenue—that’s not …

• Retailer Kohl’s says customers can now pay for purchases using their Kohl’s Charge accounts and earn points in its Yes2You Rewards program in approximately 250 stores with a single tap using Apple Pay. Kohl’s expects national availability later this month. Kohl’s says it is the first retailer to offer a …

While the payments industry has been buzzing lately with talk about the blockchain, Bitcoin has been reaching pricing levels it hasn’t seen in more than a year. The rally comes amid fresh optimism for a solution to a vexing capacity problem and for the blockchain itself, the distributed ledger that …

A well-crafted email message from an executive can cause employees to take swift action. That’s just what criminals hope for when they send phishing messages that purport to be from senior executives to more junior ones, says Scott Montgomery, vice president and chief technical strategist at Intel Security, the data-protection …

• The Federal Trade Commission is investigating PayPal Holdings Inc.’s popular Venmo mobile person-to-person payments service for possible “deceptive or unfair practices,” PayPal reported in a regulatory filing. PayPal said it received a so-called civil investigative demand March 28 from the FTC for documents and answers to written questions about …

MasterCard Inc. in the three months ending March 31 posted its biggest increase in processed transactions in two-and-a-half years, thanks to strong U.S. volumes and growth in many, if not all, other markets. The No. 2 payment card network Thursday reported its processed transactions totaled 12.6 billion in the first …

The Electronic Transactions Association, a trade group based in Washington, D.C., that represents the merchant-services industry, has opened an office in San Francisco, its first outside of the nation’s capital. The move is indicative of Silicon Valley’s growing presence within the payments industry and, specifically, within merchant services, says Jason …

It may have started with the likes of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc., but it isn’t stopping there. Having made their mark in merchant processing, high-tech payments firms are increasingly turning their attention to the business of offering funding to the merchants they serve. The move is bringing them …

With data breaches continuing to plague the payments business, and with major incidents like that of Target Corp. still fresh in the minds of payments professionals, you might think retailers would be cautious these days about their ability to ward off attackers. Not so, according to survey data released Tuesday …