The price of Bitcoin, which soared to heady heights at the end of 2016 only to drop somewhat over the last two weeks, has been much on the minds of payments observers looking to the digital currency as an intriguing new way to pay. But is Bitcoin a medium of …

Contactless cards were tried in the U.S. years ago and soon fell by the wayside, giving the technology a black eye among issuers. Now a report released Monday in the U.K., where contactless is catching on fast, could revive hopes for the technology. Some 325 million debit and credit card …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews If loyalty programs are the key to boosting usage of new payments methods like mobile wallets, ease of rewards redemption could be even more critical. On Wednesday, terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. took a step in that direction by expanding the reach of its Points Redemption …

Founded in 1990 as the national trade group of independent sales organizations, the Electronic Transactions Association is taking on a decidedly technology-oriented hue as the payments industry rapidly evolves. The ETA announced last week that an Apple Inc. executive was elected to a two-year term on its board of directors, …

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. decided to recruit order-ahead capability for its Chase Pay mobile wallet, it settled on a 6-year-old mobile payments startup whose technology could give Chase Pay a vital boost in a crucial merchant segment. Meanwhile, the alliance could also bring tens of millions of new customers …

The NFC Forum, the Wakefield, Mass.-based organization that supports near-field communication technology, on Monday announced updates to three technical specifications and introduced a “candidate” spec. NFC is the technology most often used, for example, to link mobile wallets with point-of-sale terminals. One update, to “NFC Controller Interface (NCI) Technical Specification Version 2.0,” …

After PayPal Holdings Inc. in July signed a sweeping agreement with Visa Inc., and in September reached a similar deal with MasterCard Inc., giving PayPal access to the card networks’ token engines and thereby new access to the physical point of sale, observers wondered when the other shoe would drop. It dropped …

USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), a provider of electronic payments for vending machines and other unattended locations, said Monday that it is working with Ten M. Corp. to upgrade 1,000 of Ten M’s vending machines with USAT’s ePort Connectcashless payment technology. In addition to cash, the ePort devices will enable the machines to …

U.S. merchants processing with Vantiv Inc. that want to court international e-commerce customers now can offer these shoppers alternative payment methods unique to their locations. Vantiv announced on Tuesday it is working with PPRO Group, a London-based payments provider, to enable non-card payment methods, such as direct debit, bank transfers, cash-based electronic …

The ever-expanding Internet of Things could represent a back-to-the-future security nightmare for the payments industry. What’s a network without endpoints? Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have big networks—about 8 million endpoints in the form of merchant locations that include point-of-sale terminals in the U.S. alone. But the Internet of Things, …