The mobile-wallet race, which has attracted a slew of entrants in recent months, is about to get more crowded on fears that established merchant acquirers could be elbowed out of the nascent mobile-payments business. Apriva Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of wireless technology for payments, will launch in November …

Confirming other findings that payment card usage is picking up in the U.S., Visa Inc.’s credit and debit card dollar volume rose 9% in the network’s fourth fiscal 2011 quarter ended Sept. 30 to $516 billion from $474 billion a year earlier. Payment transactions increased 7.3% to 10.5 billion. Visa’s …

Shadows darken the recent economic news, but early third-quarter reports from payments-industry companies paint a much sunnier picture. The big card-issuer and merchant processor Total System Services Inc., for instance, on Tuesday said it was increasing its dividend by 43%, its first dividend increase in five years. Last week, Visa …

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  With the holiday season weeks away, more major retailers are now offering so-called virtual gift cards. But few make the experience of buying, sending, and redeeming the digital payment products easy or pleasant, according to a report issued this week. Some 59 of the 100 largest online merchants, ranked …

  More and more shoppers are turning to e-commerce, but online merchants’ payment practices leave them poorly positioned to exploit this trend for sales, according to a recently released report. Notably, the biggest online and multichannel retailers meet on average only 36% of criteria for payment options, according to Javelin …

  PayPal Inc. will pilot its latest move to the point of sale with an undisclosed merchant this quarter, add more merchants early in 2012, and establish merchant pricing for the service over the next three to six months, eBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe told stock analysts on Wednesday. …

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  George R. Jensen Jr., founder and chief executive of USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), has resigned under a cloud, casting a pall of uncertainty over the provider of wireless payment hardware and networking services for vending machines just as new interchange schedules affecting small debit card transactions threaten to crimp …

  Many community bankers say their payment revenues are declining, and they are bracing for hits from higher expenses from complying with regulations and from fraud while at the same time trying to ramp up new services such as mobile payments. The findings come from the Independent Community Bankers of …