Our Guide spotlights how mobile payments and digital currency drive payments innovation. by John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Kevin Woodward Alternative payment schemes are becoming almost too numerous to count. A few months back, one payments-industry veteran listed all the mobile wallets he knew of and came up with about …

Peter Lucas Merchant aggregators are leading the charge to simplify merchant on-boarding and add value to payment technology. Can traditional ISOs catch up? It’s only been a few years since Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. relaxed their rules to officially recognize merchant aggregation, but in that short time the aggregator …

Jim Daly Despite the growing acceptance of pot in some states, the legal marijuana industry has a tough time getting payment-card processing and other banking services. When, if ever, will the smoke clear? Could a multibillion-dollar new merchant market be going up in smoke because of a conflict between state …

Steve Mott When EMV stalled last year, a battle royal erupted across the payments business to draft the rules for a key security technology. Here’s who’s winning—and whether that’s a good thing for the industry. The spate of mag-stripe-based data breaches over the holidays sent the industry into convulsions and …

An appellate court’s Friday decision reinstating the Federal Reserve Board’s controversial interpretation of the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment with its debit card interchange cap and transaction-routing requirements continues to draw fire, but whether the merchants and retail groups that brought the appeal and lost will trudge on in court remains …

Fiserv Inc. on Wednesday said its Accel debit network will license a critical EMV solution from MasterCard Inc. The move follows a decision by First Data Corp.’s Star network late last month to adopt similar technology from Visa Inc. and indicates the national-brand networks may be winning over the regional …

The coming of Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards to the U.S. has many American merchants worried about the inevitable shift of credit and debit card fraud from the point of sale to online channels. EMV cards, while highly effective in thwarting counterfeiting and related card-present fraud, offer no more fraud protection …

AmEx Opts for Small Merchants No longer a card brand accepted mainly in hotels, restaurants, upscale stores, and on airlines, American Express Co. is stepping up its efforts to add small merchants to its acceptance base. AmEx late last year began testing a program called OptBlue that gives partner merchant …

Jim Daly Microsoft next month will cease support for its Windows XP operating system, which runs hundreds of thousands of ATMs. But many ATM deployers seem to have adopted a “what, me worry?” attitude. In the ATM world, April 8, 2014, could go down as April Fools’ Day a week …

Prepaid card program managers and issuers are moving beyond their original customer base and ramping up offerings, producing intense competition and falling prices. By Jane Adler Shopped at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. lately? A trip past the checkout lane reveals a robust array of new prepaid card offerings. For example, Wal-Mart’s …