Mobile Commerce

  Osama Bedier, vice president of Google Wallet and payments at search-engine giant Google Inc., has left the company, Google said on Thursday. Sources tell Digital Transactions News that Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president of ads and commerce who also manages search advertising and shopping services, is now heading up …

  Mobile devices may be making it easier for consumers to shop anywhere online, any time, but high shopping-cart abandonment rates are preventing them from cashing in big on this new sales channel. A recent survey by payments-and-authentication- services provider Jumio Inc. reveals that two-thirds of respondents attempting to make …

  n Mobile payments remains a fragmented business with established financial-services players battling it out with startups and telecommunications giants. And progress for near-field communication (NFC), a snazzy, two-way contactless technology that once promised to revolutionize mobile payments, is still coming with painful slowness, according to the paper. n While …

  It looks like mobile-deposit software developer Mitek Systems Inc. and its former ally USAA Federal Savings Bank will be going to the mat in their their patent dispute. Despite a near tripling in revenues to $3.22 million, Mitek on Tuesday reported a $2.39 million loss for fiscal 2013’s second …

Often regarded as the enemy, officials from the federal government gave some friendly advice to merchant acquirers last week about what regulators are concerned with regarding payments, including mobile payments, prepaid cards, and fraud control. The recommendations came during a government panel Thursday at the Electronic Transactions Association’s annual conference …

  The retailer-backed Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) mobile-payments system on Wednesday took another step toward its launch with the announcement that Netherlands-based Gemalto N.V. would provide the technology for its mobile wallet. Gemalto, which employs 224 workers at its U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, is best known for producing SIM …

  Nearly 20,000 U.S. merchant locations now accept PayPal, up from 18,000 three months ago, according to data released on Wednesday in tandem with eBay Inc.’s quarterly earnings report. San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal Inc. is a unit of eBay. The roughly 11% jump in merchant acceptance for PayPal since eBay’s …

  Aided by an improving economy, credit cards staged a comeback in 2012, edging out debit cards as the key payment option at the retail point of sale, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. While debit cards held the greatest share of total dollar volume at …

  Fiserv Inc. executives expect the option to guarantee availability of funds loaded onto prepaid cards from a personal or business check using a smart phone to be a huge point of differentiation for Fiserv’s new Prepaid Source Capture service. Launched last week, the Brookfield, Wis.-based processor’s service enables consumers …

  Can merchants make payment applications that run on smart phones secure? Yes, but only after they take some steps they might find to be difficult, according to an expert steeped in the intricacies of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI). “Smart phones were not built for taking payments, …