By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews While the payments business is caught up these days in working out strategies for mobile apps and social media, it turns out these aren’t the cutting-edge technologies they once were. Instead, fields like virtual reality, machine learning, and natural language are winning the spotlight. That’s according …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Its first full quarter of ownership of the big Costco Wholesale Corp. cobranded credit card portfolio helped to boost Citigroup Inc.’s North American purchase volume by 57%, the giant New York City-based bank reported Friday.

• The rash of hotel breaches continues. Noble House Hotels & Resorts said it confirmed that a payment card system used at its Teton Mountain Lodge & Spa and Hotel Terra may have been breached between Sept. 5 and Sept. 6. The company said there are no indications the breach …

• Payments provider TransFirst, a unit of Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), and Raintree Systems, which provides specialized practice-management software, formed a partnership that sees TransFirst as the integrated payments provider in Raintree’s software. • Following its decision earlier this week to halt production, sale, and exchange of its troubled …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews With the deadline for EMV compliance for fuel resellers a year away, fuel-pump maker Wayne Fueling Systems LLC is readying its products for the transition from magnetic-stripe payment cards. Wayne says its NAMOS point-of-sale system is now available for EMV transactions on First Data Corp.’s network, and …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ripple effects from the Wendy’s Co. data breach continue to swirl around the Columbus, Ohio-based hamburger chain, some perhaps in unexpected ways. A Michigan credit union that last week began declining credit and debit card transactions by its members at all Wendy’s locations refuses to say …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Fuzse, a new payments company targeting merchants that want seamless payment flows, is embracing software developers and independent software vendors as a way to reach them. The Dallas-based company, founded by Lane Conner, a former executive at First American Payment Systems L.P., Century Payments, and most recently …

• Payment gateway Shift4 Corp., which claims to have introduced in 2005 the first payment-data tokenization solution, announced it has surpassed the 7-billion mark in tokenized transactions. • The NFC Forum announced it has made available a newly adopted and four candidate technical specifications for near-field communication. The adopted specification …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Ever since the advent of mobile shopping, experts have cautioned that spending in the new channel would be hampered by small screens and clunky interfaces. Now, though, relatively new technology like natural-language interfaces and so-called bots may be coming to the rescue. A new study released …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Best known nationally for its powerful basketball teams, the University of Connecticut is about to make a name for itself in cybersecurity. UConn’s School of Engineering and retail credit provider Synchrony Financial on Tuesday announced that Synchrony is providing $2.2 million to fund a new