American Express Open, part of Amex’s Global Commercial Payments division, has launched the Blue Business Plus Credit Card, a product aimed at owners of small businesses, particularly those with only one employee. The card offers two Membership Rewards points for every dollar in spending up to $50,000 in eligible purchases each calendar year and one […]
First Data will buy all of the outstanding shares of CardConnect’s common stock for $15 per share in cash. CardConnect, the 19th largest acquirer in the U.S., trades on Nasdaq. The sale to First Data is valued at approximately $750 million, including repayment of CardConnect’s outstanding debt and the redemption of its preferred stock. Publicly […]
Norway-based Zwipe has created technology to capture and store a fingerprint for match-on-card verification of a valid user. It puts that technology on inlays, which it sells to card manufacturers in the U.S. and China to be embedded in standard payment cards. Those inlays support dual interface (contact, contactless) transactions without need of a dedicated […]
Visa and Mastercard have been fighting fraudulent merchants for decades. However, the problem has changed and worsened in recent years. Card transactions tied to ethically dubious sales tactics — purchases of goods and services cardholders ultimately say they never agreed to — have been the industry’s main fraudulent merchant problem. Often those businesses worked with […]
Europe’s 10 largest merchant acquirers ranked by payment card transactions handled in 2016 are shown above. Those transactions include payments made in-store, online, on the mobile web, and in-app. Global and domestic-only general purpose credit, debit, and prepaid card brands are counted. On page 7, the chart shows the 20 largest merchant acquirers ranked by […]
Below is a list of 20 acquisitions and 20 investment transactions that occurred in 12 countries in April. Europe led with 16 deals, followed by the U.S. with 15, Asia-Pacific with 8, and Latin America with 1. Transactions involved mobile payments, micropayments, loyalty programs, hardware, lending, prepaid cards, merchant acquiring, business-to-business payments, consulting, software, money […]
Heartland Payment Systems was processing $120 billion in card payments annually when founder Robert Carr sold it to Global Payments in 2015 for $4.30 billion. After expiration of a one-year noncompete clause, Carr is back with a new merchant acquiring business called Beyond. In addition to front-end and back-office payment processing services, Beyond will provide […]
An EMV-compliant Mastercard chip card with fingerprint verification capability has been tested by employees of Pick n Pay supermarket in South Africa, and is currently being tested by employees of Absa Bank in that country. At a variety of merchants, fingerprint verification on the test cards has been successful more than 80% of the time. […]
Global remittance, foreign exchange, and payment service company UAE Exchange will offer a wearable mini contactless Mastercard payment card as an option to its Gocash prepaid card customers. Gocash began five years ago as a reloadable mag-stripe card available in one of three currencies. Today, Gocash is a dual-interface chip card loaded with up to […]
Former executives from Chase, Household, Providian, and Barclays formed the Credit Shop two years ago to offer unsecured personal loans and lines of credit to U.S. consumers with credit scores in the 575 to 675 range. All loan originations are handled online. After introducing those products, the plan was to follow with credit card products. […]
