Analytics

Digital currency, especially Bitcoin, picked up in popularity this year as the concept began garnering positive attention from payment players — but a series of negative incidents kept the skepticism alive as well.

Mortgages performed better in the third quarter than a year ago but quality has tapered off since the second quarter, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said.

D'mai Urban Spa in Brooklyn, N.Y. loves rainy days because it sees more customers when the weather is dreary. The Park Slope shop gleaned the information from Swipely's technology, which collects data on every customer that swipes a card in the spa.

As many individuals open their wallets and donate to a variety of charitable causes during the holidays, con artists and fraudsters are lurking online, using websites equipped with payments technologies, text messaging schemes and other methods to scam well-meaning do-gooders out of funds intended for worthy causes. It’s an ever-growing problem being addressed by e-commerce industry participants, law enforcement and other groups.

Voltage Security, an encryption vendor, is touting Voltage Secure Stateless Tokenization technology, which the company says provides merchants and payment processors with a new approach to protecting card data.

Transactional data reveals much about a customer to a merchant. Facebook’s social data doesn't have direct ties to spending, but it paints a detailed picture of the consumer that retailers could use to create pertinent offers that shoppers will actually use.

The BBB in Ohio reports that an operation calling itself National Fraud and Investigation Agency is running a phony collections scheme and threatening to arrest or sue those who don't pay immediately.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced plans to start sharing real-time access to its consumer complaint data with state regulators.

Now that the Electronic Transactions Association has been administering the Certified Payments Professional credential for a full year, independent sales organizations’ executives and sales agents could start facing more pressure to obtain certification, an acquiring industry veteran says.

Consumers disputed up to 38 million items on their credit reports last year at the three largest consumer reporting agencies, according to a report released Thursday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Giesecke & Devrient has introduced a security system that relies on cell phones to reduce the risk of receiving bogus bills.

ControlScan will partner with London-based Foregenix to expand its payment data security compliance services into Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Bitcoin-Central, a French digital currency exchange that handles the largely unregulated Bitcoin currency, now operates under French regulation after parent-company Paymium partnered with payment services provider Aqoba.

Skip tracing has been around for as long as consumers have borrowed and not paid back their debts - nothing new or profound there. However, like everything else, there are always new wrinkles and technologies to consider when tracking debts and debtors.

Greenwich Associates announced Monday it has agreed to acquire Javelin Strategy & Research for its work in mobile and multichannel banking, payments, security and fraud, among other expertise.

Bankers in the central U.S. may soon try to renegotiate the price they pay Equifax (EFX) to learn the creditworthiness of borrowers.

Student loan debt has grown every quarter since at least 2003, and delinquency rates look worse than previously believed.

It appears Near Field Communication payment technology is on the verge of coming into its own — at least in terms of its availability, though not necessarily in consumer adoption.

JPMorgan Chase's approach to instantly issued debit cards today seems like that of many other banks — it helps checking customers get cards faster. But its future plans for the technology suggest a more ambitious goal.

With each new mobile-payment function developers create for smartphones, a correlating new security risk arises. The riskiest aspect for merchants, issuers and consumers remains the initial phase — when consumers enroll for a product, says ValidSoft Ltd.