Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
A new Tennessee law governing merchants’ payment card contracts could create headaches for non-bank entities such as independent sales organizations and payment facilitators, merchant-acquiring industry sources say. The law will require processors on a monthly basis to list all fees assessed since the last statement. That’s certainly not unusual in …
February, 2016
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22 February
Thompson Investments Steps in to Acquire Troubled Powa Technologies
Powa Technologies Ltd., the troubled startup behind PowaTag and the PowaPOS line of mobile point-of-sale gear, is being acquired by Thompson Investments, according to a terse announcement released late Friday. No terms were released. Before Thompson stepped in, London-based Powa Technologies had been reported to be close to appointing management consultancy …
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19 February
MasterCard Adding Location Tech As Part of Trend Toward User-Based Card Controls
With an eye to giving credit and debit card holders a measure of greater control, MasterCard Inc. unveiled a new alert feature that provides issuers with verifiable data about a cardholder’s location. That can help prevent authorization refusals, for example, when the cardholder travels. Available now in the United Kingdom, and …
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19 February
Competition And Pricing Could Have Been Culprits in Flint Mobile’s Apparent Demise
Flint Mobile Inc., a startup whose app allowed merchants to process transactions by using their smart-phone camera to scan customers’ card numbers, abruptly ceased operations earlier this month and has arranged for merchants to switch over to Stripe for processing. That’s according to MerchantMaverick.com, a merchant-processing review site Flint, which …
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18 February
With Its Payroll Service, Square Seeks Cross-Sell Avenues to New, Larger Merchants
Square Inc. introduced its payroll service for small businesses last June in California, and in the eight months since then Square Payroll has proven to be popular enough that the company added two more states in November and on Wednesday said it is expanding into five more. But while Square …
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18 February
M-Commerce Logged a Banner Fourth Quarter, With Smart Phones Outpacing Tablets
U.S. consumers apparently held onto and used their smart phones and tablets even more than one might suspect given the increase in mobile-commerce transactions during the fourth quarter of 2015, reports Criteo, a New York City-based online marketing specialist. In its “State of Mobile Commerce Report,” released Wednesday, Criteo said …
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18 February
The PCI Council Plans an Early Release of Its Updated Data-Security Standard
The PCI Securities Standards Council said Wednesday that the next iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard will be coming in the first half of this year, probably in March or April, about six months earlier than called for in the current update cycle. The new version, dubbed PCI …
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17 February
Security Questions Arise as Biometrics Gain Ground in Authentication
With biometric authentication now enabled in millions of smart phones and the focus of intense technological development, some payments experts are warning that biometric data can, just like old-fashioned passwords, be stolen, potentially leading to big problems for consumers and payment-service providers. “Biometrics are sure to proliferate in the next …
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17 February
Eye on EMV: Merchant Adoption Shortfall; Visa Chip Card Tally Tops 212 Million
Patience, it seems, will be the watchword when it comes to merchant adoption of EMV chip card technology, while the number of cards issued bearing a chip continues to grow. A new report from The Strawhecker Group, a payments consultancy, finds that 37% of U.S. merchant locations are EMV-ready, falling …
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16 February
Look for Dominance by Smart Phones in Mobile Commerce Very Soon, Report Says
The onset of 2017 will usher in the year of the smart phone in e-commerce, according to a projection released Tuesday by eMarketer Inc. The New York City-based researcher says that next year, for the first time, more than half of all so-called digital buyers—51.2%—will make at least one purchase …