Discover bests the four top Visa and MasterCard issuers with solid growth in outstandings. However, Discover’s gross dollar volume (GDV) rose 6% to $31.7 billion, compared to $28.1 billion in Q1/14 and $29.7 billion in Q2/13. Volume growth was lackluster compared to the Big 4 Visa and MasterCard issuers.
TSYS racks up record revenues in the second quarter. In the North America segment, TSYS reported the largest quarter of transaction volume in history at 2.7 billion. In the NetSpend segment revenue rose 11.4% to $116.8 million.
BofA lowers costs for low-value cross-currency payments. The new CashPro Payments service allows companies to make recurring low-value cross-currency payments that are either business-to-business or business-to-consumer.
Fundtech launched Mobilescape VX, a device upgrade for its Mobilescape wireless card processing solution. The hardware combines Verifone’s VX 680 POS hardware with Fundtech’s software, transaction processing, wireless service, and customer support. The new handheld terminals include a color touch screen and an ARM11 processor, as well as compatibility with the web-based Mobilescape Manager platform. Mobilescape VX provides U.S. businesses with traveling sales personnel the capability to accept card payments from anywhere via a small, portable device that is compatible with the AT&T cellular network.
Visa moves 500 employees to downtown San Francisco to hobnob with payment innovators. The centerpiece of One Market will be an innovation center designed to provide an immersive experience for clients and partners, where they can interact with Visa subject-matter experts, and explore new products and technologies that advance the payment experience in areas such as mobile, security and cloud-based technologies.
MasterCard’s new ElectraCard unit names a new top executive. Ram Chari will serve as Chief Executive Officer of ECS. He has worked for MasterCard in the APMEA region.
MasterCard’s new prepaid travel card takes aim at young UK travelers. The Chip and PIN card can handle seven currencies and is supported fully by MasterCard’s global network.
Forrester’s Mobile Banking Functionality Benchmark methodology finds foreign banks outpacing U.S. banks. Garanti Bank of Turkey took the top spot. The bank received the highest overall score among the banks Forrester rated, performing exceptionally well with its new mobile banking app iGaranti.
Taulia raised $27 million in Series D funding. The round was funded by current investors, including Matrix, Trinity, Lakestar, DAG, and led by QuestMark Partners. The funding comes as the San Francisco-based startup has seen more than a 300% increase in revenue during the first two quarters of 2014, compared to the same two quarters from 2013. Taulia attributes the unprecedented growth to doubling its number of customers in 2014, and maintaining its 100 percent customer retention and renewal rate. This includes a number of significant customer wins in EMEA following the opening of a London office on November 2013. San Francisco-based Taulia provides some of the world’s largest organisations with cloud-based invoice, payment and dynamic discounting solutions.
Contis Group has signed Ffrees to its fully managed, integrated current account with a Visa debit card and loyalty and rewards program. Contis’ end-to-end service capabilities and next generation Visa e-money platform allows Ffrees to launch a complete reinvention of the current account, enabling families to save as they spend, avoid exorbitant bank charges and take advantage of a variety of innovative money management tools that are available via their online account facility. Since the launch of its new products in October 2013, Ffrees has attracted more than 20,000 customers to its services and continues to issue new accounts at a rate of 200 a day.
All My Papers (AMP)All My Papers (AMP) announced that its software application, All My Checks, is in use by Tangerine Bank (formerly ING DIRECT). This Windows-based software application creates correctly formatted Canadian electronic Cheque Image Cash Letter Files for remote deposit to direct clearing banks.All My Checks allows for secure and rapid implementation of check image clearing process. Indirect clearing banks in Canada and the U.S. can now use the ready-to-run application to minimize operational costs and increase accuracy. All My Papers supports the Canadian CPA 015 standard which is based on the US X9.100-187 standard.
Oberthur Technologies announced its partnership with Cumulocity to offer an application enablement and objects management platform for the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) markets. This new OT solution has the flexibility to address various M2M use cases from fleet management and asset tracking to industrial remote maintenance and surveillance, among many others.The IoT market stakeholders such as mobile operators, OEMs and enterprises need to remotely control and automate the management of these objects. OT is now able to propose a simple and secure solution to help them collect data from any connected object over any network, manage them in real-time including remote configuration and software updates or real-time alerts, and easily develop business applications. This future-proof solution offers maximum scalability and native support for Big Data use cases, including Big Data collection, storage and analysis.