The topic of faster payments has won plenty of publicity in recent years, but less celebrated is the mundane business of crediting merchant accounts. That’s getting faster, too, and the latest development is a service called Funds Now, which PayPal Holdings Inc. announced Tuesday. With this service, online merchants in …

Mobile payments are booming in places like China and India, but in the United States, not so much. Year after year, one reason that keeps popping up in surveys is concerns about security, and on Tuesday a major standards body announced a measure aimed squarely at those fears. The Accredited …

Data breaches bring a slew of bad consequences for the victim, not the least of which are the costs of lost business, remediation, and, possibly, litigation. But for publicly held entities, there’s an additional risk: a lasting hit to the share price. For 24 companies whose shares are traded on …

For all the gyrations Bitcoin and its enthusiasts have experienced over the past 12 months, the digital currency has managed to trace a relatively calm track lately. It remains, however, an acquired taste for users, and while some independent sales organizations have begun efforts in recent weeks to sell it …

July and August are big vacation months in China, and this year Chinese travelers’ use of the Alipay mobile-payment service boomed as users ventured abroad, according to figures released Wednesday.  In related news, China’s Ant Financial Services Group confirmed on Wednesday that Souheil Badran, who had headed up Alipay’s expansion …

With mobile-payments volume increasing while confidence in passwords slumps, researchers are predicting big growth for mobile authentication via biometric technology such as facial or voice recognition. In one forecast, from the United Kingdom-based firm Juniper Research, the number of mobile users authenticating themselves by such technology will grow over the …

The business of getting merchants to accept cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin has started to attract independent sales organizations and payments-tech firms alike, and now Square Inc. has jumped in with a proposed service that some experts say could help the payments-technology powerhouse grab a share of online volume. The U.S. Patent …

The Western Union Co., which has been expanding its digital footprint for several years, announced a major move on Wednesday into Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Online and mobile money transfers will start over the next few weeks in Malaysia and Singapore, the company said, with service already …

Reacting to violent clashes a year ago in Charlottesville, Va., between white supremacist groups and counter demonstrators, several major payment systems shut down access for supremacist organizations that used the systems to process donations. But now a social network devoted to activist causes says PayPal Holdings Inc. is still processing …

In response to Canada’s moves to introduce further regulation of its payments industry, the Washington, D.C.-based Electronic Transactions Association said this week it is “expanding” its advocacy effort into that country. So far, the ETA’s effort includes hiring a lobbyist to represent the interests of Canadian payments companies and U.S. …