Payment processing

KKR & Co. reported first-quarter profit that topped all analyst estimates as payment processor First Data Corp. and other holdings drove gains.

The payments processing and technology giant should add more merchant services and marketing to its Star network to overcome competitive and regulatory pressure, writes Eric Grover, a principal at Intrepid Ventures.

Walmart adjusted two of its long-standing, in-house offerings this week, saying it was lowering the rates for its domestic Walmart2Walmart money transfer service and adding a digital money transfer service with Bluebird2Walmart.

The global messaging network Swift and its fintech challenger, Ripple, have been vying for bankers’ hearts and minds for more than a year. Whoever prevails, their latest moves could bring needed change to how international banking is done.

In the midst of some company restructuring, Total System Services Inc. delivered a 60% increase in total revenue during the first quarter of 2017 at $1.2 billion, compared to last year's $739 million.

Vantiv has agreed to acquire Paymetric, an Atlanta-based company that automates business payments processing.

With The Clearing House still targeting November for the launch of its Real-Time Payments service, it relies on a wide range of partnerships to introduce this offering to the banks that would use it.

D+H Corp. has opened its technology to U.S. banks for testing on The Clearing House’s real-time clearing and settlement network in the next phase of development of faster payments.

Attacks on ATMs and point-of-sale machines are getting more sophisticated and frequent. Crooks are trying to get as much use as they can out of their skimming devices before the migration to chip cards is complete.

Using a program built by Ripple, BBVA has transferred about 50 euro-denominated payments to Mexico from Spain in seconds. Such transactions normally take up to four days to clear, the bank said.

Payments and liquidity management provider Dovetail wants to make sure banks in the euro zone have the systems in place to allow business customers to take advantage of new options for sending and receiving payments later this year.

The majority of small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. and Europe express an interest in real-time payments, but very few are aware of the current options being tested and brought to market.

Attacks on ATMs and point-of-sale machines are getting more sophisticated and frequent. Crooks are trying to get as much use as they can out of their skimming devices before the migration to chip cards is complete.

Ripple's distributed ledger platform has fed an appetite for cheaper and more efficient cross-border payments, but it may not measure up to the needs of a larger market. Ripple wants to scale its payment system to something resembling a large card network.

Check imaging reduces the need to handle paper, reduces clearing time and paves the way for mobile deposit and remote capture. However, this new functionality also means financial institutions take on greater risk from electronic acceptance, images in the cloud, and significantly reduced float times.

Verifone has spent years clawing its way out of a crater it dug for itself, so a fresh coat of paint on its website might seem like a minor thing. But it signals the latest big shift in the company's sales strategy.

The company is diversifying from its traditional payments processing business into a broad-based provider of payments technology and data services.

Ant references data breaches connected to Euronet and warns of job losses if the European company were to acquire MoneyGram.

The speed of the crooks and the threat to retailers and customer data is more than enough reason to get aggressive with new identity protections.

The software allows chip card terminals to be operable much faster than with full certification. In other markets outside the U.S., semi-integration is widely used.