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 …

Square Inc. on Wednesday ended months of speculation with an announcement that it will begin offering an EMV card reader early next year. Square will start taking orders for the device, which will process chip-and-signature as well as mag-stripe transactions, later this year, the San Francisco-based company said. The move comes …

Zooz Mobile Ltd. is preparing to launch in September a transaction-routing engine that will let so-called omnichannel merchants run payments for e-commerce, mobile commerce, and in-store commerce through a single pipe. The engine, tentatively called the Omnichannel Generator, will seek out the optimal path for each transaction, allowing merchants to …

Amazon.com Inc. on Monday refused to comment on a report that the big online retailer is preparing to launch a mobile card reader to compete with Square Inc., PayPal Inc., and dozens of other vendors. “We can’t comment on rumors and speculation,” an Amazon.com spokesperson told Digital Transactions News by …

Transactions using mobile wallets totaled at least 250.6 million and amounted to at least $9.5 billion in value in 2012, according to a payments report issued Thursday by the Federal Reserve. These results, part of a comprehensive update to a study released in December, represent the central bank’s first effort …