The first chapter in the U.S. conversion to the EMV chip card standard is not even complete, but a leading payment card manufacturer sees growing interest in the next chapter, one that could be centered on so-called dual-interface cards that enable contact and contactless transactions. The vast majority of U.S. …

Canada’s Interac Association PIN-based debit card network once again is reporting lower fraud losses as the country’s conversion to the EMV chip card standard nears completion. The Toronto-based network said Thursday that fraud losses from skimming, in which card data are stolen from the magnetic stripe, to financial institutions that …

Green Dot Corp. announced a number of a new products Wednesday and said it was getting into lending in order to generate new revenues and expand beyond its prepaid card base. Under pressure from a large investor to boost its bottom line and flagging stock price, Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot reported …

A new Tennessee law governing merchants’ payment card contracts could create headaches for non-bank entities such as independent sales organizations and payment facilitators, merchant-acquiring industry sources say. The law will require processors on a monthly basis to list all fees assessed since the last statement. That’s certainly not unusual in …

The PCI Securities Standards Council said Wednesday that the next iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard will be coming in the first half of this year, probably in March or April, about six months earlier than called for in the current update cycle. The new version, dubbed PCI …

With biometric authentication now enabled in millions of smart phones and the focus of intense technological development, some payments experts are warning that biometric data can, just like old-fashioned passwords, be stolen, potentially leading to big problems for consumers and payment-service providers. “Biometrics are sure to proliferate in the next …

A new data element is getting a lot of discussion in merchant-acquiring and mobile-payments circles. It’s the so-called Payment Account Reference, or PAR, and it’s meant to associate all the payment tokens linked to a single credit or debit card primary account number, or PAN. But implementing PAR could be …

Editor’s note: Read the latest by clicking here. A spate of media reports that Visa Inc. owns nearly 10% of Square Inc. are wrong and are based on a misreading of a filing Visa made Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to a person familiar with the matter …

It was all over the financial press Friday morning that Visa Inc. owned nearly 10% of merchant processor Square Inc. But it turns out that Visa’s real stake is a tad lower—try less than 2%. The news stories, which started with a Reuters report out of India, were based on …

As promised, the Electronic Transactions Association has updated its 2014 guidelines for merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations on merchant underwriting and monitoring. And more updates are likely as technology and regulators keep the pressure on merchant processors to stay ahead of risks to the payment system. “We really want …