Kate Fitzgerald is an Arizona-based senior editor for American Banker and longtime payments reporter. Fitzgerald began her journalism career at the San Diego Tribune, and has worked as a reporter and editor at several other publications, including Advertising Age and the Arizona Republic. She is a graduate of Lewis & Clark College and holds a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
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Credit card issuers are beginning to see significant upticks in credit card account charge-offs, with Discover the latest to report a spike, flagging a 55% hike in losses during the most recent quarter. But what exactly is driving the increase?
August 7 -
A Netherlands-based startup called Dentacoin is setting up a blockchain-based system enabling patients to pay for dental care with its Ethereum-based tokens guaranteeing lifelong, fully covered dental care.
August 4 -
From gold plating to silicon guts, the plastic card is not what it used to be. Here are some of the most ambitious attempts to make credit and debit cards relevant in a high-tech world.
August 4 -
Germany-based Payworks is the latest to partner with Ant Financial’s Alipay as it works to expand the base of merchants capable of accepting the popular Chinese online and mobile payments app in Europe.
August 3 -
Flywire and Volvo Car USA have formed an agreement to streamline cross-border payments for international students leasing cars from Volvo.
August 3 -
PayPal now enables Skype users to send funds to one another while chatting on Skype’s mobile app, but the connection came too late for investors who hoped to see this happen when PayPal and Skype lived under the same roof as subsidiaries of eBay.
August 2 -
Indonesian online payments company KinerjaPay has opened a gift card center enabling consumers to purchase gift cards with bitcoin from major U.S. merchants including Amazon, Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.
August 2 -
Toronto-based Glance Technologies has introduced a new version of its Glance Pay mobile payments app that uses micro-location sensing technologies along with image recognition, an approach it says is easier for merchants to adopt than QR codes.
August 2 -
Plenty of U.S. merchants still working to complete their migration to EMV now have another high-pressure technology hurdle to worry about: Most are still using a core transaction security protocol set to expire in the next 11 months and if they don’t take appropriate action they’ll be unable to process transactions.
August 2 -
San Francisco-based startup UnifyID is developing an “implicit authentication” platform that requires no conscious actions by users to authenticate identities, and it’s just closed $20 million in fresh funding to support its growth.
August 1 -
In the next phase of India’s push to diminish the country’s heavy reliance on cash, the Reserve Bank of India has approved the rollout of a national electronic bill-payment system.
July 31 -
Vienna-based paysafecard, which enables unbanked consumers to make online payments using a service backed by a prepaid card, is expanding to the United Arab Emirates.
July 31 -
Starbucks has hit a mobile payments milestone, with 30% of all U.S. transactions now coming through mobile, and to smooth operations surrounding its popular Mobile Order & Pay service, the company is introducing digital-ordering specialists at its busiest stores.
July 28 -
Rising fraud rates in mobile channels have spawned a bumper crop of new tools to battle crime, but merchants appear to lack consensus on which ones are most effective.
July 27 -
When breaches occur it is the standard practice for the notification to come directly from the company affected. The difference with Discover's service is that, because it's an opt-in program, its users may already be bracing themselves for bad news.
July 27 -
Total System Services Inc. said its income surged during the second quarter of 2017 based on continued revenues that totaled $1.2 billion, up 6.1% from $1.5 billion a year earlier.
July 26 -
Ant Financial’s Alipay has formed a partnership with a large Malaysian bank, enabling the bank to advance its own mobile payments services using Alipay’s platform.
July 25 -
American Express is giving its card customers an easy way to transact in cryptocurrency.
July 25 -
Visa’s efforts to expand its mobile payments service mVisa in developing nations reached a milestone this month in Nigeria, the first country where banks are enabling cross-border payments with the QR code-based mVisa technology.
July 24 -
Mobile wallets have failed to excite many consumers, but Canada has an extreme case of paralysis underscoring the stark need for ongoing incentives to get consumers to change their payment habits.
July 24
