Visa Inc. and banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Tuesday announced a 10-year partnership that promises to shake up the merchant-acquiring world by creating direct links between card issuers and merchants. Chase, which owns the nation’s second-largest acquirer, Chase Paymentech, is licensing a private version of Visa’s VisaNet transaction-processing …

Nine months after unveiling its digital-wallet strategy, MasterCard Inc. on Monday announced the start of that strategy’s implementation. Known as MasterPass, the new wallet platform enables mobile payments by consumers using either near-field communication (NFC) technology or quick-response (QR) codes to trigger links between handsets and merchant terminals. Wallets based …

Visa Inc. is teaming up with the hot smart-phone manufacturer Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to kick-start the market for near-field communication (NFC) payments, and it’s also got a deal with technology provider Roam to develop mobile payments. Under an agreement with South Korea-based Samsung that Visa announced Monday, banks and …

  The funk at VeriFone Systems Inc. continued late Wednesday when the leading point-of-sale terminal maker said revenues and profits for its first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended Jan. 31 would come in far short of earlier predictions. The downward forecast triggered a selloff in VeriFone’s shares, whose price was …

  With the United States playing catch-up with Canada and much of Europe in deploying chip card technology, security firms are starting to respond to online operators’ fears that the arrival of chips at the point of sale will drive fraud to the Internet. One of the latest of these …

  The effort to harness debit card networks for near-instant person-to-person payments is moving apace. The latest development is this week’s announcement that the Houston-based Pulse electronic funds transfer network has enabled a service that will let cardholders pay each other by entering their debit card PINs on a so-called …

While still down from high levels in 2009, identity fraud rose for the second straight year in 2012, according to the latest annual ID-fraud study from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin estimates that 5.26% of U.S. consumers were ID-fraud victims last year, up from 4.90% in 2011 and the recent …

  n The report, which covers the third quarter of last year, documents a steady decline in both the number of unique sites hosting phishing attacks and the volume of reported attacks. The number of phishing sites detected by the APWG fell in step-like fashion from 63,253 in April to …

  The PCI Security Standards Council on Thursday released yet another set of data-protection guidelines for mobile payments, this one aimed at merchants using smart phones and tablet computers to accept credit and debit cards. Although it touches on many points, the guidance especially focuses on the software running on …

  Merchants that think by hiring a cloud-based provider to handle their payment card security tasks they’ll never have to worry again about protecting card data had better think twice, according to the PCI Security Standards Council. “Just because people outsource to a cloud service provider, they’re not done,” says …