First Data Corp. has added another digital gift card company to its portfolio with the purchase announced Tuesday of Transaction Wireless Inc., a digital gift card distribution company. The purchase of San Diego-based Transaction Wireless complements First Data’s 2014 deal to buy Gyft, a digital platform that enables consumers buy, …

PayPal Inc.’s plans to include three payment technologies—magnetic stripe, contactless, and EMV—in its upcoming mobile point-of-sale device could help the payments company capitalize on growing interest in mobile wallets. Many companies are betting on mobile wallets. But part of the ante is ensuring consumers can use their stored credit and …

Retailers, especially larger ones, face a contradiction: they know they need to update their point-of-sale systems to take advantage of new technologies and consumer-shopping behavior, yet most resist that urge because of the expense. That’s one of the findings from “Commerce Convergence: Closing the Gap Between Online and In-Store,” a …

Social-media network Facebook Inc. says its Messenger person-to-person payments service is available nationwide beginning Tuesday. Messenger is Facebook’s direct-messaging service. In March, the network launched the P2P service to a few locations. David Marcus, Facebook vice president of messaging, made the announcement of general availability today on Twitter. Both senders …

By Kevin Woodward Encryption technologies, which mask sensitive card data with mathematically derived characters and numbers, appear to be the security method that resonates best with merchants. That’s the result of a Digital Transactions News survey that asked about EMV, tokenization, and encryption. Forty-five percent of respondents cited encryption, followed …

With $12 million in new funding, PayRange Inc. wants to place more of its Bluetooth-equipped dongles inside vending machines to enable more consumers to make contactless, and cashless, payments. The funding, announced Thursday by Portland, Ore.-based PayRange, will be used to expand its staff and increase the number of PayRange-equipped …

Now that a federal appeals court has refused to stay a lower court’s ruling, merchants are free to induce customers to use cards other than those of American Express Co. while the appeals court hears AmEx’s argument that the lower court erred. That means merchants, at least for now, have …

Contactless payments made by tapping a smart phone against a point-of-sale terminal are increasing, according to a Harris Poll survey released Thursday. The survey of more than 2,200 U.S. adults found that the proportion of the general population who either experienced or witnessed a contactless smart-phone payment increased from 17% …

With no exemptions for small merchants from the Oct. 1 liability shift for EMV transactions, efforts to educate them are well under way, with even the largest of banks instructing them on what EMV means for their businesses. “It’s more of an industry message,” says Deanna Karhuniemi, vice president of …

U.S. consumers shopping online in the first quarter of 2015 used smart phones to place 18% of all online orders. That’s according to the Demandware Shopping Index. Demandware Inc. is a Burlington, Mass.-based e-commerce platform. The index found that smart phones, too, accounted for 38% of the overall Web traffic …