The earliest known example of a closed-loop gift card was offered during the Christmas holiday season in 1916 by Hampton’s Quality Store in Eugene, Ore. The store advertised a “Christmas Glove Gift Card” that could be given to a lady, allowing her to redeem it for the gloves she wanted. …

While the payments industry waits for Apple Pay and other promising applications to help mobile catch on in in-store payments, it’s already blazing ahead in online bill pay. Some 27 million U.S. households are paying at least one bill each month on a mobile phone, according to research from banking-technology …

When it comes to Bitcoin, no major merchant has more experience with the digital currency than e-commerce giant Overstock.com, which has been accepting it since Jan. 9. Now, with nearly a year of experience under its belt, the retailer will close out 2014 with about $3 million in Bitcoin sales, …

By John Stewart While payments executives are abuzz about how mobile devices are transforming the business, they are slowly coming to realize that not all mobile users—and certainly not all mobile devices—are equal when it comes to such metrics as the average value of payments and rate of usage. The …

Dwolla Inc. has entered the race to simplify—and ultimately speed up—payments between individuals and between organizations and individuals. Starting Thursday, the 6-year-old Des Moines, Iowa-based payments provider is allowing people who don’t have Dwolla accounts to receive payments from Dwolla users and flow them directly into their bank account. The …

NACHA on Tuesday opened for comment a sweeping proposal to introduce a same-day settlement mechanism for the automated clearing house network. The comment period will run through Feb. 6, the regulatory body for the ACH announced. If the proposal is approved, the ACH network will process almost 1.4 billion same-day …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

While governments and established payments networks around the world reckon with Bitcoin, the upstart digital currency has itself had to reckon this year with volatility that has seen its price plunge about 50% since its $700-plus January high. But in other respects, Bitcoin is riding high. One of the latest …

By John Stewart The advent of younger users, combined with the rise of smart phones and a much-improved user experience, is helping to drive a surge in mobile person-to-person payments. But providers still haven’t figured out how to make money on the service, which lets consumers use smart phones to …

As small online merchants prepare for holiday-season sales, they’re seeking out financing to support extra help and added order fulfillment, and that’s boosting new financing options from online processors. PayPal Inc., for example, now has 20,000 mostly e-commerce businesses using its 15-month-old PayPal Working Capital merchant cash-advance service. It has …