Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Tokenization is nothing new. Various companies have for years offered the service, which replaces the actual card credentials a thief needs to make illicit purchases—primary account number, card-verification value, expiration date—with a random string of characters for digital transactions. But what is new is that Visa and Mastercard have finally …
June, 2017
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1 June
Beyond Payments With Bob Carr
For former Heartland Payment Systems Inc. chief executive Bob Carr, the next venture goes beyond simply making money. Carr led the $4.3 billion sale of his old company to Global Payments Inc. in April 2016. But rather than ride off into a comfortable retirement, Carr is back with his latest …
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1 June
Behind the Fraudsters’ Epidemic of Card Testing
When you’ve got something hot like stolen credit card numbers, you have only a brief opportunity to cash in before they go cold. Manually sifting through hundreds, even thousands, of card accounts bought in bulk can take more time than criminals have, which is why they increasingly are relying on …
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1 June
It’s Bust-Out Time for Alipay in North America
For the China-based Alipay payments service, pursuing niche merchant markets in North America no longer is good enough. “When we’re looking at partners, we’re looking for ubiquity,” says Souheil Badran, president of Alipay North America. Those partners so far include First Data Corp., which in May opened its huge U.S. …
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1 June
Get Set for Quantum Computing
The connection between computing capacity and payment practice is obvious to all. While passing coins hand-to-hand remains a ritual, the bulk of human transactions are carried out through electronic computing. Now, all the computers that we know—mainframes, minis, PCs, tablets, smart phones, and so on—are a special case of a …
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1 June
What To Watch in Payments
What are the ingredients of payments modernization in the United States? I suggest there are three: 1. Faster Payments The race to create a U.S. faster-payments system has begun. What’s not clear is what it will look like at the finish line. The variety of systems being either launched or …
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1 June
An Approaching P2P Payments Upswell?
A survey for megabank Bank of America Corp. indicates that consumers of all ages are ready to embrace electronic person-to-person payments. BofA’s latest Trends in Consumer Mobility Report, released last month, found that 36% of all respondents use a P2P payments service. Market-research firm Convergys queried for the bank 1,005 …
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1 June
Pressure Builds for Cannabis Payments
The growth of the legal cannabis industry will force bankers and payments executives to examine the business prospects of serving that industry, according to an executive with a regional automated clearing house association. While marijuana remains illegal under federal law, 29 states have approved for it for use by adults …
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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, …
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1 June
iPayment Launches Gateway and other Digital Transactions News briefs
• Marking an end to American Express Co.’s cobranded card losing streak, hotel chain Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. named AmEx as its exclusive credit card issuer effective Jan. 1, according to Bloomberg. AmEx and Citigroup Inc., which took over issuance of the Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded card from AmEx a year …