Square Inc.’s official filing to go public means it will soon exit an exclusive club that’s becoming less exclusive by the month: the so-called unicorns, or privately held companies that are worth $1 billion or more. There are 143 such companies now, up from 123 in early August. Indeed, more …

After languishing in the $200s most of the year, the price of the Bitcoin digital currency rallied this week, briefly flirting with the $500 level on some exchanges before settling in the high $300s by Friday morning. At the same time, Bitcoin usage, though still relatively rare, is steadily rising. …

When it comes to payments between individuals, cash and checks are still wildly popular, even among Millennials, despite years of penetration by online and mobile methods. Indeed, 71% of consumers made at least one person-to-person payment with cash last year, and 56% did so with a check, according to a …

The Federal Reserve may be shepherding a nationwide effort to bring real-time payments to the United States, but that doesn’t mean payments companies are marking time while that process unfolds. The latest development is Tuesday’s announcement that bank processor Fiserv Inc. will work with risk manager Early Warning Services LLC …

Ending months of speculation, Visa Inc. on Monday announced it will buy its European counterpart, London-based Visa Europe Ltd., in a cash, stock, and earn-out deal valued at $23.4 billion. “We’re delighted to be reuniting the Visa family,” said Visa Inc. chief executive Charles W. Scharf in discussing the acquisition …

Up to now, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo payments service has been strictly a mobile person-to-person product appealing largely to twenty-somethings, but within a year users will be able to pay with Venmo at PayPal merchants if the parent company’s plan works out as expected. PayPal disclosed Wednesday in its quarterly …

With two key announcements this week, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC has brought the finish line much closer in its run to build a U.S. real-time payments system. While the New York City-based company has not set a date for completion, senior executives told Digital Transactions News Tuesday TCH …

JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Monday unveiled its Chase Pay mobile wallet and said the product will begin rolling out in the middle of next year. Chase also said its new wallet will be accepted at merchants belonging to the Merchant Customer Exchange LLC, a retailer-controlled consortium that has been …

Now that merchant acquirers, and, by extension, merchants, are liable for certain kinds of fraud losses if the merchants aren’t prepared for EMV chip cards, acquirers are starting to put in place EMV non-compliance fees to cover their new risk exposure. One of the first to move on this is …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …