A bill introduced Thursday with bipartisan backing in the U.S. Senate would prevent federal regulators from cracking down on banks that provide financial services to legal marijuana businesses. The bill, similar to one pending in the House of Representatives, aims to rectify the lack of access many recreational and medicinal …

By Jim Daly Next week’s planned split of PayPal from parent company eBay Inc. has payments investors anticipating that plenty of locked-up value and growth opportunities will be released for the online payments leader. PayPal began trading on a so-called “when-issued” basis Monday on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the …

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday issued nine guidelines summarizing its vision for faster payments as banks, payment processors, tech companies, and other government regulators continue work on proposals for improving U.S. payments. “Companies developing new financial technologies should be building systems from the outset with consumer protections …

New data from Visa Europe indicate that while contactless payments are still a small portion of European card-based payments, they’re growing fast and likely far exceed the current level of U.S. contactless payments. London-based Visa Europe, a bank-owned licensee of Visa Inc., on Monday said there are 2.6 million contactless …

With a little more marketing oomph behind it, the gift card market rebounded in 2014 after a down year in 2013, according to a report released Wednesday by Mercator Advisory Group. Virtual gift cards, a small but key segment of the market, held their own and may soon benefit from …

Despite its strengths, online wire-transfer provider Xoom Inc. faces increasingly tough competition from newer market entrants such as PayPal Inc., which is taking its popular Venmo person-to-person payments service abroad, and from established agent-based providers such as The Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International Inc., which are increasing their online …

Merchant processor Vantiv Inc. has won one of the biggest retail merchant-processing contracts out there—the U.S. Postal Service’s credit and debit card business, including its USPS.com online component. Counting post offices, branches and substations, the Postal Service has more than 35,000 retail outlets in all 50 states, U.S. territories and …

Point-of-sale payment card fraud will be easing off thanks largely to the introduction of EMV chip card payments to the United States in the next few years. But fraudsters, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research, will be back in stores armed with cards using stolen credentials …

The clearXchange payments service owned by five of the nation’s six largest banks on Monday announced a real-time payments service that includes not only its original person-to-person payments franchise but also business-to-consumer payments. Mike Kennedy, chief executive of San Francisco-based clearXchange, tells Digital Transactions News that the system is live …

Judging from new Federal Reserve data, April was a month of joy for merchants and credit card issuers as consumers spent more on their credit cards, but for consumer advocates and financial advisors it may have been a month of angst as they saw foolish consumers take on too much …