Mobile Commerce

With nearly half of all holiday shopping expected to be conducted online, attention is turning to the first line of defense against fraud: the humble password. As it turns out, this bulwark isn’t nearly as strong as it could be, according to a study released Tuesday by Dashlane Inc., a …

Plastic gift cards remain king, but consumer awareness of mobile and electronic gift cards is increasing. That’s one result from the Retail Gift Card Association’s survey about gift card use. The survey canvassed more than 1,000 consumers. In the survey, fully 49.7% said they understand how to redeem a mobile …

Square Inc.’s official filing to go public means it will soon exit an exclusive club that’s becoming less exclusive by the month: the so-called unicorns, or privately held companies that are worth $1 billion or more. There are 143 such companies now, up from 123 in early August. Indeed, more …

Square Inc. on Friday set a price range for its planned initial public offering of stock in which the high end could generate about $333 million for the merchant processor. Square filed an amended registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission stating that it plans to sell 25.65 million …

When it comes to payments between individuals, cash and checks are still wildly popular, even among Millennials, despite years of penetration by online and mobile methods. Indeed, 71% of consumers made at least one person-to-person payment with cash last year, and 56% did so with a check, according to a …

Just as Visa Inc. prepares to swallow up the 38-country Visa Europe system, at least one market researcher has released a report expressing some doubt about how long Visa and its bank card rival, MasterCard Inc., will be able to maintain their share of card-accepting merchants around the world. On …

Technology enabling consumers to deposit checks by snapping pictures of them on their smart phones and uploading the images through their mobile-banking apps has been around for more than five years, but mobile remote deposit capture very much remains a new product for many banks. An April-May survey by Alpharetta, …

  If consumer adoption of mobile payments is going to break past its current low rate, purveyors of the services will have to find new ways of making m-payments faster and more convenient to use, and attractive for merchants to accept. That’s the assessment from Derek Francom, director of PayPal …

Up to now, PayPal Holdings Inc.’s Venmo payments service has been strictly a mobile person-to-person product appealing largely to twenty-somethings, but within a year users will be able to pay with Venmo at PayPal merchants if the parent company’s plan works out as expected. PayPal disclosed Wednesday in its quarterly …

Samsung Pay, the mobile-payments service from Samsung Electronics Co. Inc., has added 14 Visa-MasterCard payment card issuers. In addition, Verizon Wireless, the holdout mobile carrier that was absent from Samsung Pay’s launch a month ago, is now supporting the service, a Samsung executive said Wednesday. “We’re expanding our ecosystems,” Thomas …