National Gift Card Corp., a marketer and supplier of gift cards for use in loyalty, incentive and rewards programs, has appointed Bill St. Clair senior vice president of operations. NGC Europe also made two recent appointments to its management team: Christine Rodriguez and Neil Pagnam.
The Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100, which ranks the U.K.’s private technology, media and telecom companies with the fastest-growing sales over three years, has ranked Prepaid Financial Services, a global payment services provider and fintech company, No. 22.
Online money transfer service WorldRemit has announced the hiring of Gabriella Poczo as chief technology officer.
UK building society Nationwide has begun a £500 million project to improve its branch network using NCR latest generation of self-service ATMs. The project aims to bring the kind of self-service experience customers can get at supermarkets to the retail bank branch.
Those enabling payments for online gaming Websites have a new, rather large competitor.
Fiserv Inc. will be enabling consumers to access their cash without using a payment card at participating ATMs.
San Francisco-based Stripe is hoping to accelerate the spread of buy buttons, this week unveiling Relay, a service enabling consumers to make a purchase from within a mobile app or a social media site like Twitter, without bouncing to a merchant’s e-commerce site.
Smartphones are becoming more integral to the shopping experience in the U.K., where consumers are increasingly using mobile devices to make in-store and online purchases and to research products, a new report found.
UKGCVA’s reply to Ireland’s proposal to ban expiration dates on gift cards and vouchers.
Visa set a deadline for its debit card issuers to request extra payment on top of the monies the issuers will receive in accordance with an earlier settlement reached with Target related to the 2013 breach.
Litigation involves a $7.25 billion settlement deal with retailers, after it was disclosed that a defense attorney shared information with an attorney for the plaintiffs.
Abercrombie & Fitch and RadioShack class action decisions involving closed-loop gift cards warrant attention.
The London Stock Exchange has sold its Proquote market data and retail trading services business to Australian financial technology specialist Iress, which is expanding its capital markets and funds operations in the UK.
When Discover Financial Services goes live this week with Apple Pay, customers who’ve been waiting to access the m-payments service with a Discover card will get a chance to reap one of the richest rewards programs available for Apple Pay users.
Startups in the San Francisco Bay Area brought in 71 percent more investment capital than those in other areas of the U.S., according to new data from FinLab. Meanwhile, London is hosting 10 of Australia’s most promising fintech startups, and Visa Inc. looks to add 2,000 new technology professionals to boost its digital financial services business area.
Mozido has lofty expectations for TradeEase—what the company says is the first-ever platform enabling cross-border e-commerce payments between China and Russia.
Central banks need to play a greater role in the provision of infrastructure for low value payments and existing models revised to balance risk and rewards, according to new research published by the Swift Institute.
The London Stock Exchange says that the launch of Turkish derivatives on its derivatives market represents part of the long-cherished goal of growing its derivatives business around the world. It also represents the exchange’s ‘open access’ policy.
In honor of the celebration, NBPCA released some statistics about payroll cards, including how much businesses and employees save using them.
The mobile payments race just kicked into high gear, with Google Inc. today announcing the immediate launch of Android Pay, joining Apple Pay with a little more than two weeks to go before Samsung Pay rolls out Sept. 28 in the U.S.
Digital wallet providers have an easier route to issuer integration with the new MasterCard Digital Enablement Express service, but one analyst suggests it may be more difficult for providers—outside of Apple Pay—to collect issuer fees.
In another indication of blockchain technology’s potential for payments, a group of major industry players have made a $30 million equity investment in blockchain startup Chain Inc.
Paybefore Award-winning Simple, the Portland, Ore.-based branchless bank founded in 2009, this week said it’s eliminating all consumer fees and will rely exclusive on earning interest and interchange for its revenues.
Russia’s central securities depository NSD has implemented back-to-back settlement technology for off-exchange delivery-versus-payment transactions with securities denominated in Russian rubles. The bank accounts and transactions may be in rubles, US dollar, Euro and Chinese yuan.
The Payment Systems Regulator, the new economic regulator for UK payment systems, today confirms the line-up of the Payments Strategy Forum it has set up to set the strategy for innovation in payment systems where the industry needs to work together.
Barclays has launched a cloud-based contingency payment service for corporates, which the bank says will help corporates to make payments even if they are unable to use their primary channel, for example during an internet outage. The deal comes as financial institutions and corporates increase their focus on risk mitigation.
GPR cards with savings features could help lower-income cardholders set money aside for unexpected costs and learn better overall financial habits, a new Boston Fed report suggests.
Consolidation in the payments industry continues as MetaBank expands its presence in the tax services space with the completion of its acquisition of Fort Knox Financial Services Corp., and Finicity Corp. continues its fintech investment by buying payment processor and program manager Aurora Financial Systems Inc.
Global smart card production has doubled in the last 36 months, in part, because of the U.S. migration to EMV this year. And instead of displacing physical cards, new mobile wallets—including Apple Pay—are contributing to higher overall card production rates, according to Europe’s Smart Payment Association (SPA).
MyBank is looking for participants in a pilot phase for its Identity Verification Service to Payment Service Providers and service providers. The pilot will start in mid-November 2015 and run until February 2016. The aim of the pilot is to test the MyBank Identity Verification to ensure reliability, security and the usability of the solution.
Data breaches are getting worse with 246 million records compromised by criminal activity in the first six months of 2015, according to new figures published by digital security company Gemalto. The numbers suggest cyber-crime will remain a top priority for banks for the foreseeable future.
Most U.S. merchants won’t be ready to process chip cards by the Oct. 1 EMV liability shift, but the somewhat alarming numbers don’t tell the whole story, according to card processing industry veteran Ian Drysdale, executive vice president of sales and business development, North America, for U.S. Bank’s Elavon. EMV already accounts for as many as 20 percent of transactions for some merchants, and momentum is shifting fast.
Retailers globally may be facing pressure to adopt new payment technologies, as shoppers demand simpler and more innovative ways to pay, according to MasterCard’s first Retail Social Listening Study. The first-of-its-kind study taps into what consumers are saying on social media about payments and popular retail sectors.
Card-linked offers could help marketers, retailers and issuers as consumers seek more efficient ways to redeem loyalty points and coupons—especially among the coveted millennial demographic—a recent study says.
Post-trade processing company Bloomberg STP Solutions and post-trade and risk specialist Traiana have begun a joint effort to develop a straight-through processing infrastructure for FX options. The partners say it will help to reduce post-trade costs for market participants, which have typically remained higher than execution costs.
European stock exchange BATS Chi-X Europe has created a new order book for auctions, which it says will help traders to make larger trades. The new book is set to go live on 19 October, and represents an effort to satisfy long-term traders interested in larger order sizes.
Figures from Link, the UK’s cash machine network, show that the number of ATMs in the UK reached 70,180 in July, passing 70,000 for the first time. ATM figures from July, show that the total amount withdrawn from cash machines in July 2015 was £11.3 billion, up 4% compared with July 2014.
The International Securities Services Association adopted a set of compliance principles to address the “critical challenges” posed by financial crime. The new principles aim to establish “a clear global standard for the opening and maintenance of cross-border securities accounts”.
When I joined the company in 2007, Google was just a search engine and Apple had nothing to do with payments. It was a time many prepaid executives have compared to throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks—not everything did.
Australia’s central bank may begin regulating American Express cards in the country, putting at risk the generous rewards points cardholders earn on so-called “companion cards”— credit card accounts linked to two different credit card networks, thus enabling cardholders to earn the benefits of whichever one they choose to use at the point of purchase.
