The telco-controlled mobile-wallet provider Softcard scored a major coup on Tuesday with the announcement that the massive Subway sandwich chain will start accepting its wallet Oct. 1 at its more than 26,000 U.S. locations. When complete, it will be the largest restaurant deployment yet for payments via near-field communication (NFC) …

The general-purpose prepaid card market is hot, but most smaller financial institutions find it a daunting task to start and run a prepaid program. To fill that gap, Capital Prepaid Services on Monday launched a prepaid Visa card with two small banks as part of a campaign to make prepaid …

Apple Inc.’s new mobile-payment system may be a long-awaited shot in the arm for near-field communication (NFC), but it could also cool off an NFC variant that has caught fire since it emerged only 10 months ago. Apple Pay, which the iconic computer giant unveiled to enthusiastic applause Tuesday, will …

Bitcoin Shop Inc. runs an e-commerce marketplace offering about 140,000 products, which on the face of it isn’t all that remarkable. What sets the 1-year-old site apart, though, is that it accepts only digital currency. No cards or bank-account transfers, please, just Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. But Arlington, Va.-based Bitcoin …

Mobile-payments providers have looked to offers and rewards as a means of engaging with consumers and merchants and boosting payments activity. Indeed, most mobile strategists value the technology’s ability to deliver rewards at the moment consumers are in the store, if not necessarily in front of the relevant merchandise. But …

The regulatory body for the automated clearing house network on Tuesday unveiled two new network rules that, among other changes, will lower a key threshold for unauthorized returns, impose new fees on originating banks for unauthorized debits, and hand new enforcement authority to the ACH regulator, Herndon, Va.-based NACHA. The …

Deals for financial and payments technology companies drove worldwide merger-and-acquisition activity in the technology sector to new highs in the second quarter, according to a report released on Thursday. n Transactions for payments and financial technologies firms was especially heavy in the second quarter. The quarter’s 60 deals exceeded the …

In a move that could significantly boost mobile-payments activity, PayPal Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a single-click payment method for merchant apps. Dubbed One Touch, the method allows mobile users to log in once with their user names and passwords, then simply touch or click on a “buy” button for all …

With a major deadline arriving in October 2015, U.S. payments players are expected to be busy in the coming months converting systems to be compliant with the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard. But with liability for counterfeit card fraud shifting in 14 months to the party not prepared for EMV, how …

Top executives at MasterCard Inc. on Thursday trumpeted the card network’s gains with MasterPass, its digital wallet, and downplayed the impact of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s ongoing conversion to Visa Inc. Introduced two years ago, MasterPass is now operating in 10 countries with “tens of thousands” of merchants and will …