With a crucial deadline just five months away, the U.S. Department of the Treasury is blanketing the country this month with press releases urging recipients of Social Security and other benefits by check to adopt electronic payment. In the campaign, which started last week, the agency is sending out releases …

The market for person-to-person payments, which has percolated on low heat for several years, is showing signs of turning up the temperature. As an example of how far the market has come, the two major P2P payments networks, Fiserv Inc.’s Popmoney and clearXchange, a system unveiled last year by Bank …

In what amounts to a reminder about an unanticipated consequence of the Durbin Amendment debit card regulations, USA Technologies Inc. (USAT) reported Wednesday that it had extended its agreement with Visa Inc. that provides the vending-machine payment network operator with favorable pricing on small debit transactions. The news wasn’t a …

It’s time for bankers to stop looking at mobile technology merely as a cost cutter and start using it to make money, said speakers at a retail-banking technology conference on Tuesday. Banks that add a variety of new services to their mobile offerings ranging from in-store bar-code scanning to expedited …

  n Online daily-deal leader Groupon Inc. followed up on its big payments announcement of last month with Wednesday’s national rollout of its Breadcrumb service, a point-of-sale system for restaurants, cafes, and bars centered on Apple Inc.’s iPad tablet computer. n Breadcrumb itself is not a payments service, but is …

The obituaries for debit card rewards may be premature. Of the 100 largest issuers of debit cards ranked by debit purchase volume, 37 now offer a rewards program, down from 52 three years ago. But 19 issuers with $10 billion or more in assets still offer a program, despite a …

In a play for the business of what an American Express Co. executive calls “the unhappily banked,” AmEx and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Monday introduced their Bluebird prepaid card for U.S. customers of the world’s largest retailer. The card not only expands the consumer markets that AmEx, normally associated with …

Merchant Customer Exchange, the planned mobile-payments network by and for retailers, is more than an interchange play controlled by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., according to an executive whose company is represented on the nascent network’s board of directors. Stephanie Swain, senior director of financial services at electronics retailer Best Buy Co. …

The nascent market for faster funds transfers, which has been on the boil all year, heated up further this week with Fidelity National Information Services Inc.’s announcement of its real-time PayNet network. The new system, which relies on FIS’s NYCE Payments Network LLC debit switch, is live with 200 FIS …

With a major chip card standard bearing down on U.S. merchants, acquirers, and issuers, small merchants in particular could face tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in annual fraud losses they are currently protected from, a processor executive argues. Patty Walters, senior vice president for merchant products and …