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 EMV...One Year Later
Tomorrow marks the one year anniversary of the EMV liability shift in the U.S. In case you missed it, TSG released survey data last week estimating 44% of U.S. card-accepting merchants have EMV terminals, while 29% of merchants can actually accept chip-based transactions (see the infographic for more).
See below for a round-up of EMV articles this week:
Banks & Credit Unions: If you haven't reissued your debit cards with EMV, now is the perfect time to understand your branding options and the financial benefits that are available. Contact TSG for help today.
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Just Released - TSG's Attractive Vertical Analysis
This report, utilizing data from TSG's proprietary data warehouse of over 3.5M merchants, lists 282 merchant types and includes key metrics on each of them including volume statistics, profitability, and attrition. Using the Profitability and Attrition Metrics, a score is assigned to each merchant type. This is the "attractiveness" of the merchant.
Preview | Purchase - priced at $2,495
ROI
Users of this type of data have seen increases of $10 of net revenue per merchant per month by optimizing their portfolio pricing.
Forward-thinking payments companies are using this type of data to prioritize their sales strategies as well as benchmark their own metrics.
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TSYS announced that John Shlonsky, senior executive vice president of TSYS, and president of TSYS’ Merchant Services segment, has resigned effective October 7. Shlonsky joined TSYS in April of this year as a result of the company’s acquisition of TransFirst, where he was president and chief executive officer. A search has begun for Shlonsky’s replacement. In the interim, Pamela Joseph, TSYS’ president and chief operating officer, will assume leadership responsibilities for the merchant segment to ensure a seamless leadership transition.
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Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Executive John Stumpf took another beating on Capitol Hill Thursday, facing a withering bipartisan attack from members of the House Financial Services Committee. At issue were his bank’s allegedly “widespread illegal” sales practices, which prompted Wells Fargo earlier this month to reach an $185 million settlement. The bank opened as many as 2 million customer accounts with fictitious or unauthorized information. Mr. Stumpf had already faced a harsh grilling from the Senate’s Banking Committee last week over the matter.
Related: Wells Fargo's Reaction to Scandal Fails to Satisfy Angry Lawmakers
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Wells Fargo announced on Tuesday that it would claw back compensation valued at $41 million from its embattled chairman and chief executive, John G. Stumpf, as the financial consequences of the scandal over illegally created sham accounts at the bank reached the executive suite. The action represented one of the first times since the 2008 financial crisis that a chief executive has been forced to give up compensation. Many large companies have adopted clawback provisions at the urging of regulators and shareholder advocates, but boards have been hesitant to invoke them.
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For merchants still on the fence about whether to buy Square Inc.’s $49 contactless card reader, there’s a new enticement to consider: Square has sped up the time it takes to accept EMV cards by 1.5 seconds. The San Francisco-based company has released an update to the NFC-enabled reader that reduces transaction speed to 4.2 seconds, about 25% faster than its previous fastest speed of 5.7 seconds, according to a Sept. 26 blog post. Square said it is able to achieve this speed because it designs both the hardware and software of its readers.
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The stock dropped about 5% on Friday after reports that 10 hedge fund clients are reducing their dealings with Germany's biggest bank. Earlier in the day losses reached more than 8%, taking the stock to a new low. The action by the hedge funds, which was first reported by Bloomberg, is fueling anxiety about the bank's financial health. Investors also have worries about whether the bank will be able to afford a looming U.S. fine for trading in toxic mortgages a decade ago.
Related: How US Regulators May Be Creating Panic Around Deutsche Bank
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A federal appeals court on Monday handed American Express Co. a signal victory in the age-old battle with merchants over card-acceptance costs, but in doing so it may also have bolstered the card giant in its efforts to set and enforce merchant pricing. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled AmEx did not violate antitrust rules with its so-called non-discriminatory provisions (NDPs). These provisions banned AmEx-accepting merchants from inducing—or “steering”—customers to use other cards or other payment methods when they tried to use an AmEx card.
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Strategic initiatives aimed at lowering electronic transaction times reflect a growing interest in faster electronic payment transactions in public and private sectors, payments analysts have noted. Some attribute heightened awareness of transaction times to efforts at implementing EMV (Europay, Mastercard and Visa) technologies following the Oct. 1, 2015, liability shift. Others credit an ongoing scourge of high-profile data security breaches for the retail industry’s interest in real-time payments as a deterrent against fraud.
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The record-breaking Yahoo breach wasn't perpetrated by nation-state attackers, as Yahoo has claimed, but rather by a group of "professional blackhats from Eastern Europe" who are also suspected of stealing and reselling customer data from LinkedIn, MySpace and Tumblr, according to a new report from the security firm InfoArmor. Yahoo didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the InfoArmor report.
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IBM announced plans to acquire Promontory Financial Group, a global market-leading risk management and regulatory compliance consulting firm. Upon close, the capabilities of Promontory combined with IBM's deep industry expertise and Watson's cognitive capabilities will directly address the massive operational effort and manual cost of escalating regulation and risk management requirements. Promontory's 600 professionals are based in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific - many of them have deep and varied expertise amassed over decades as senior leaders of regulatory bodies, financial institutions and Fortune 100 corporations.
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Citigroup on Wednesday became the last of the big U.S. banks to agree to allow customers to send instant payments by mobile phone over an industry network that is competing with upstart Venmo. Citigroup said in a statement that it will begin offering the service early next year over the clearXchange network. ClearXchange has emerged as the industry’s rival to Venmo, a non-bank payment service of PayPal Holdings, which is winning fans among young adults who use it to split apartment rents and dinner tabs.
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LG Electronics has delayed the launch of LG Pay to next year due to problems during testing in Korea, reports local media NewsOne. The company initially wished to launch the service with the V20, sales of which start in South Korea on September 29, but cancelled, the report says. The main delay stems from the firm's plan to pair it with the universal payment "White Card", which has not been commercialized in the country before, the report said. White Card is a physical card with credit and debit card information saved to it, connected to the smartphone via NFC. It also supports IC and mag-stripe payments.
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Samsung Pay celebrates its first anniversary in the U.S., building on the digital wallet’s record of success. In just one year, Samsung Pay has driven innovation, adding features like support for membership and gift cards and coupons, allowing users to slim down their wallets. Samsung Pay now supports over 500 banks and credit unions, representing over 80 percent of the debit and credit card market in the U.S. Samsung Pay also now offers new features including an in-app coupon service to search, store and redeem coupons, as well as a new cloud storage feature to restore membership, gift and Samsung Reward cards whenever they sign into a new device.
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Microsoft has been digging deep into the data created by its $120bn treasury unit in search of real-world use cases where blockchain could cut costs. Culling through this trove of information, Microsoft's newly appointed principal program manager and lead blockchain engineer, Marley Gray, searched for pain points and labor intensive processes that were adding complexity and error to his company's operations.
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Think about the latest trends in innovation and what does your mind imagine? Maybe you think about the connected home, such as a door that either greets you by name based on your height and cadence of your step or recognizes and stops a two-year-old from wandering out of the house unattended. Maybe you imagine appliances that can order and purchase goods, such as the dishwasher that orders more detergent when the bottle is low. Perhaps you imagine something we often hear about in the news: a car that can map a route and deliver its passengers without a driver. Maybe none of these come to mind because they sound far-fetched.
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The Federal Reserve proposed easing “stress-test” requirements for banks with less than $250 billion in assets, a major piece of good news for U.S. regional banks. Fed governor Daniel Tarullo, speaking at Yale University on Monday, said banks with less than $250 billion in assets that don’t conduct significant nonbank or international activity would be exempt from the “qualitative” part of the Fed’s annual stress tests.
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Most enterprises, when addressing mobile security, focus on securing applications, such as the devices' operating systems, or preventing the installation of malware. But the cybersecurity experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology say organizations should take a much broader approach to ensuring mobile security. Referring to the need to address the risks posed by cellular networks and other elements of the mobile infrastructure, NIST Cybersecurity Engineer Joshua Franklin says: "There is this whole other side of a mobile device that has its own complex hardware, firmware, software and network protocols that need to be addressed."
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Crooks who deploy skimming devices made to steal payment card details from fuel station pumps don’t just target filling stations at random: They tend to focus on those that neglect to deploy various tools designed to minimize such scams, including security cameras, non-standard pump locks and tamper-proof security tape. But don’t take my word for it: Here’s a look at fuel station compromises in 2016 as documented by the state of Arizona, which has seen a dramatic spike in fuel skimming attacks over the past year.
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Five years in and a million complaints down. That is the story the CFPB is putting out today — since having been founded in 2011, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has handled over one million consumer complaints, a milestone they sailed past earlier this month.The news was released in connection to the publication of the September 2016 Monthly Complaint Report (Volume 15), known collectively in the financial services sector as the monthly airing of the grievances.
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More than 90% of consumers use their smartphone more than any other device, Mastercard’s Impact of Innovation study reveals. Consumers would also rather use biometrics than PIN codes when it comes to paying for things – saying they’d prefer fingerprint recognition. The Mastercard Impact of Innovation study surveyed 23,000 consumers in 23 different countries across Europe, Africa and the Middle East about their attitudes to digital technology.
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In a startling development, almost unheard of outside a recession, food prices have fallen for nine straight months in the U.S. It’s the longest streak of food deflation since 1960 -- with the exception of 2009, when the financial crisis was winding down. Analysts credit low oil and grain prices, as well as cutthroat competition from discounters. Consumers are winning out; grocery chains, not so much. Their margins and, in some cases, their stock prices, are taking a hit.
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Another year, another data point showing Amazon has surpassed Google as the default search engine for shopping. Fifty-five percent of people in the U.S. now start their online shopping trips on Amazon.com, according to results from a 2,000-person survey commissioned by the e-commerce startup BloomReach. That stat marks a 25 percent increase from the same survey last year, when 44 percent of online shoppers said they turned to Amazon first.
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Revenues are on the rise for small and mid-sized U.S. companies that sell goods and services internationally, according to the 2016 American Express Grow Global Survey. In the survey of companies selling outside the U.S., 80% say revenues are greater compared to one year ago, and on average one quarter (26%) of their revenue growth can be linked to international sales alone. Additionally, as companies forecast future revenues, they are optimistic about exporting.
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Mastercard makes it even easier for developers to create next-generation commerce solutions with the launch of Mastercard Developers. This single gateway enables Mastercard partners to access a diverse range of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) across payments, data and security. The platform also includes a ‘New and Experimental’ API category that enables partners to test new technologies and applications. The experimental APIs, developed at the company’s eight R&D Labs around the world, will help partners build, scale and enable payments on new platforms.
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PayCertify, an innovative fraud solution for Card-Not-Present transactions, has launched a payment gateway that simplifies integration and provides advanced fraud and authentication tools for merchants with the flip of a switch. Layering on top of Kount's technology along with their own unique fraud solutions, PayCertify’s gateway is both easy to implement and use, saving merchants time with one seamless integration. PayCertify eliminates concerns about fraud with an enhanced authentication option.
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Vantiv Integrated Payments, a Vantiv company, and a provider of payments technology and services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), announced it now offers a PCI listed validated point-to-point encryption (P2PE) solution for Verifone devices. In conjunction with Vantiv’s award-winning triPOS solution, Independent Software Vendors (ISV) can deliver a higher level of security that is easy for the merchant to adopt, which addresses the challenges with protecting payment card data, and reduces the merchant’s PCI-DSS compliance efforts.
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Visa Inc., in partnership with Oracle, introduced Visa Advertising Solutions, a new suite of products to help merchants understand whether their digital advertising efforts are influencing consumer purchase decisions online and in-stores. Leveraging digital advertising and cross-device connection data from Oracle Data Cloud with aggregated purchase data from Visa Advertising Solutions, merchants can measure consumer response to advertising campaigns run on mobile, display, video and social channels, and use the insights gained to optimize their efforts.
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One of the pain points we hear from our customers is that it still isn’t easy to pay for rent. Seventy percent of renters still pay by check, even though credit cards are gaining traction. PayLease, a leading payments and billing platform for property managers, has shared with us their vision to extend their reach in the digital space and offer a new payment option through PayPal to receive rent payments. We listened, and together in partnership, we are rolling out a secure way for residents to pay their rent online through PayPal. For property management firms, this means they will soon be able to collect and manage HOA, billing and utility expenses all through PayPal as well.
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Rakuten.com, a leading US eCommerce marketplace, has announced its collaboration with Payoneer, an innovative online payments company transforming the way businesses send and receive cross-border payments. The new offering allows merchants from all over the world to sell on Rakuten.com and get paid in their local currency via Payoneer. Founded as Buy.com in 1997 and acquired by Rakuten Inc. in May 2010, Rakuten.com boasts a customer base nearly 20 million strong, offers over 22 million products sourced from thousands of merchants and is a recognized and respected brand all over the world.
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JPMorgan Chase, one of the town’s largest employers, announced Wednesday it plans to relocate roughly 600 workers in Salem across the country, starting in 2018. The Chase Commerce Solutions office, which handles payment processing for the firm, will ultimately be closed down as part of an effort to consolidate locations and real estate resources into 19 global strategic hubs. The Salem employees will be relocated to three of those hubs: Dallas, Tampa, Fla., and Tempe, Ariz.
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Elavon, a leading global payments provider and subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp, has released enhancements to Payment Navigator, its healthcare payments solution designed to help providers better manage their revenue cycle, while also improving the patient experience. Payment Navigator, powered by InstaMed, improves the likelihood that providers receive payment for their services by making it easy and convenient for patients to make payments. The solution even offers options such as payment plans with automatic notifications about upcoming plan transactions.
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Worldwide, people make more than $1.7 trillion in non-cash payments every year. Making those payments as instant and open as cash is a top priority for FIS, a global leader in financial services technology and, it has made great headway toward such a goal by putting payments solutions in place around the world. FIS’ Open Payment Framework (OPF) and the applications derived from this state-of-the-art technology are built to enable customer-facing organizations to offer more insight, lower costs and enhanced flexibility to better manage consumer adoption.
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CardConnect announced that Jason Williams joined the company as Senior Vice President, Business Development. In this role, Jason will build and manage CardConnect’s partner channel, with special focus on Independent Sales Organizations (ISOs) and banks. “We’ve placed a heavy emphasis on developing scalable technology and processes that will ensure our partners’ success in a competitive and vastly changing industry,” said Angelo Grecco, Executive Vice President of Business Development at CardConnect.
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BBVA is creating an innovation hub in Dallas and stocking it with 60 experts in data analytics, software engineering, and user experience and design, to co-ordinate the bank's global approach to improved customer interactions across all channels. The employees at the BBVA Creation Center bring experience in digital, online and emerging technologies, and will work with local teams across the dozens of countries in BBVA’s global footprint.
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Merchant Advance Capital, a leading online business lender, is pleased to announce its partnership with global payments processor and acquirer EVO Payments International. The companies have joined forces to provide a technology-powered option for obtaining collateral-free financing for EVO's significant merchant base of small- to medium-sized businesses across Canada. Both companies have built strong reputations on pioneering systems currently used by Canadian merchants.
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Fiserv, Inc., a leading global provider of financial services technology solutions, has partnered with FCTI Inc., (FCTI), a nationwide ATM network company, to provide transaction processing for nearly 8,000 ATM terminals at franchise- and corporate-owned 7-Eleven stores across the United States. Through the partnership, Fiserv will provide ATM device driving, transaction authorization, network gateway access and switching and settlement. Additionally, Fiserv will tailor its self-service tool to meet the specific needs of these ATMs to enable FCTI to do self-terminal setups.
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Bluefin Payment Systems, the leading provider of PCI-validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE) solutions announced a partnership with Spectra by Comcast Spectator, the experts in hosting and entertainment, to provide Bluefin’s P2PE solution to clients of Spectra’s Ticketing & Fan Engagement division through Decryptx, part of Bluefin’s suite of PayConex P2PE products.
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PayCommerce, a leading enterprise cross-border payments network announced at Sibos (Booth #E89), the introduction of its instant cross-border payment, clearing and integrated settlement program for global banks. With a worldwide banking consortium of 90+ banks, the program aims to achieve instant settlement into India from several regions including the US, the UK and the UAE. In 2017, the firm plans to rollout additional originating and receiving countries including Mexico, other GCC countries and South Africa; followed by Australia in 2018.
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Financial Transmission Network, Inc. (FTNI) announced the launch of the newest version of its ETran online payment portal solution. Part of FTNI’s award-winning ETran integrated receivables platform, the ETran online payment portal helps companies streamline the acceptance, processing and posting of one-time or recurring online ACH and Credit card payments. Notable new enhancements to the ETran online payment portal include the ability to view summarized or original versions of invoices directly within the portal and the addition of a “Pay due” button allowing customers to conveniently select all currently due invoices for payment with a single click.
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PayNearMe Inc., a cloud-based, real-time money movement platform, has appointed Kristina Campbell as its Chief Financial Officer. The company's products provide secure, real-time bill payments for consumers, an extensive network of retail locations for businesses to collect cash payments, and best-in-class bill presentment technology for financial services companies. Prior to joining PayNearMe Inc., Campbell served as the General Manager of GoBank, a mobile and online checking account product created by Green Dot Corporation.
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First Atlantic Commerce (FAC), a global payment gateway that specializes in the Caribbean, and Caribbean Utilities Company, Ltd. announced a payments partnership that will provide a convenient and secure online bill payment option for CUC customers. By selecting FAC’s comprehensive payments platform, CUC customers can now pay their electricity bills online through the PowerPay platform. They are also able to take advantage of PowerPay’s simplified auto-pay bill pay solution as a result of tokenization services offered by FAC.
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