For all the talk about independent software vendors and value-added resellers as an alternative channel for acquirers to sign up new merchants, the ISV/VAR share of the market is actually quite small, according to research released last week by Annapolis, Md.-based First Annapolis Consulting. The research does indicate, however, that …

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

While the payments industry has been buzzing lately with talk about the blockchain, Bitcoin has been reaching pricing levels it hasn’t seen in more than a year. The rally comes amid fresh optimism for a solution to a vexing capacity problem and for the blockchain itself, the distributed ledger that …

So far, online merchants are winning the battle against fraud, but the gains are coming at a high cost, according to the latest annual fraud study from CyberSource Corp., set for release next week with results for 2015. The progress also comes as card-not-present merchants prepare for an expected onslaught …

It may have started with the likes of PayPal Holdings Inc. and Square Inc., but it isn’t stopping there. Having made their mark in merchant processing, high-tech payments firms are increasingly turning their attention to the business of offering funding to the merchants they serve. The move is bringing them …

When it comes to mobile payments, few operators can equal PayPal Holdings Inc., a fact the company underlined on Wednesday when it reported mobile volume reached $21 billion in the first quarter, up fully 54% year-over-year. But casting a shadow over the good news was a continuing downward trend in …

With data breaches continuing to plague the payments business, and with major incidents like that of Target Corp. still fresh in the minds of payments professionals, you might think retailers would be cautious these days about their ability to ward off attackers. Not so, according to survey data released Tuesday …

With just five days remaining, organizations developing so-called faster-payments systems are submitting proposals for evaluation by a consulting firm retained by the Federal Reserve Board’s Faster Payments Task Force. On Monday, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, which is building a real-time payments system with Fidelity National Information Services Inc., …

Walmart Pay, the mobile-payments app developed by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., is now broadly available to consumers as part of version 6.8 of the retailing titan’s shopping app, introduced this week for Apple Inc. smart phones. The app update, available on the iTunes store, says Walmart Pay will be “available in …

As federal regulators increasingly zero in on data breaches, lawyers at a payments conference on Wednesday warned that organizations that suffer breaches are likely to have a tougher time avoiding legal liability in the years ahead. And the PCI Security Standards Council disclosed some of the major changes in its …