The annual MidWest Acquirers Conference concluded Thursday in Chicago with a series of sessions addressing several hot-button payments issues. Here’s a rundown of the more salient remarks: —Whither the independent sales organization? With the fundamentals of the acquiring business rapidly turning towards mobile and cloud-based technology, ISOs are finding themselves …

Students from outside the United States are flooding the country to attend colleges, universities, even secondary schools, and that presents a payments problem for them and their families. Wire transfers, the typical way for foreigners to pay tuition and other fees, are cumbersome and expensive. Enter peerTransfer Corp., a 4-year-old …

On the eve of his company’s separation from long-time parent eBay Inc., PayPal Inc.’s new chief executive on Thursday let it be known he intends to dramatically boost usage among PayPal’s 169 million active accounts by stressing single-touch checkouts and new capabilities like Xoom, the online-remittance service it is buying …

The United States appears to be making steady progress in its conversion to the EMV chip card standard. Some 120 million chip cards were issued by the end of last year, a figure expected to balloon to 600 million by the end of 2015, according to the EMV Migration Forum, …

The price of Bitcoin, which has languished under $300 for more than six months, briefly shot past that milestone over the weekend, only to close lower in trading later Sunday. The digital currency, which traded well over $600 a year ago before beginning a slide that saw it plunge below …

By John Stewart When the Internet, and then mobile and cloud-based technology, began to radically change the acquiring business, some independent sales organizations thought they could adapt by becoming software companies without changing the way they do business. They were wrong, and that mistake is costing them dearly, argues Rick …

By John Stewart With Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. making headway with online merchants with their streamlined checkout services, it was only a matter of time before network rivals introduced their own versions. American Express Co. did just that Thursday, announcing what it is calling an “unwallet” to allow its …

America’s tardiness in adopting EMV chip card technology has long been known to contribute to rising rates of fraud here, but now it appears the country’s plans to convert to EMV are, ironically, causing pain overseas. Fraudulent cross-border transactions on debit cards issued in the United Kingdom increased 25% in …

While social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest develop so-called buy buttons for the ads they sell, third-party developers are looking at extending the same technology across not only social networks but apps, mobile sites, and even emails. One of the most aggressive of these developers, Santa Clara, Calif.-based XpressBuy …

The gold rush in payments-startup financing that began about a year ago is likely to be even bigger in 2015, according to the latest report from CB Insights, a New York City-based investment-research firm. Last year set a record for startup funding, with $2.23 billion pouring into new payments companies. …