It’s best known for its Gift Card Mall displays of retailer gift cards and other prepaid cards in grocery stores, but prepaid card services provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. is a force in general-purpose reloadable (GPR) prepaid cards. It had a GPR business even before 2010, when it launched its …

The recently disclosed data breaches at Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus Group have breathed new life into an industry dispute over how to account for network choice in routing EMV debit transactions. The ATM Industry Association on Tuesday issued a statement critical of MasterCard Inc. for earlier this month declaring …

The number of credit and debit cards compromised in 2013’s data breaches was on track by mid-December to be more than double the number of cards compromised in 2012, but then along came Target Corp.’s massive breach that exposed 40 million more. Thus, the Identity Theft Resource Center now estimates …

Against a backdrop of knotty problems besetting the U.S. introduction of EMV, a financial-services standards body is investigating the potential for a set of non-proprietary chip card rules for EMV debit routing. n The group also broke up into subgroups during the meeting, which was held Dec. 9-10 at the …

The huge data breach at Target Corp. and now one at upscale department store Neiman Marcus Group and possibly other retailers has introduced many Americans to the term “EMV” and the possibility that more secure Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip cards will replace vulnerable magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards in the United States. …

The smoke seemed to clear a bit this week on the status of electronic payments for Colorado shops selling now-legal recreational marijuana, but the nascent merchant category still remains in what effectively is a legal no man’s land between conflicting state and federal laws. Some 20 states and the District …

For Retailers, An Unsettling Settlement Retailers and their trade groups opposed to a $5.7 billion settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange are not going gentle into that good night now that U.S. District Judge John Gleeson has approved the controversial deal. Defendants in the 8-year-old litigation, …

Karen Epper Hoffman After a major failure several years ago, biometrics is enjoying a renaissance in payments. As usual these days, mobile has a lot to do with it. So does the fear of fraud. Think of it as an authentication trinity—what you have, what you know, what you are. …

A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

It had been fairly quiet on the retailer data-breach front for quite some time until Wednesday, when news broke that Target Corp. had suffered what apparently was a major breach of magnetic-stripe data from payment cards. Target confirmed Thursday that the breach potentially compromised 40 million credit and debit accounts, …