Coveted word-of-mouth advertising is failing the mobile-payments services offered by technology giants. That’s the assessment from the Q1-2018 Mobile Pay Tracker report from Auriemma Consulting Group. Though 34% of consumers among the more than 1,500 surveyed use mobile payments—up five points from a year ago—not many are as willing to …

We list 37 entries this year, of which only three appeared in our original Guide nine years ago. This year’s Field Guide represents our 10th annual effort to catalog the broad currents in electronic payments by listing some of the more salient players providing alternatives to the big network brands. …

For all the hype lately, the digital currency remains a niche opportunity for independent sales organizations and other third-party acquirers. On the eve of the 76th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Valve Corp. dropped a little bomb of its own. The Bellevue, Wash.-based parent of Steam, a marketer of popular online …

The plague of data breaches is bad enough. What’s worse is the impact it’s having on outdated and overburdened systems. Here’s what can be done about it. Every year, more and more consumers fall victim to card-payment fraud. Fraudsters are adapting quickly to security measures, exploiting human trust, and finding …

With transaction laundering and false-front Web sites a growing problem for acquirers and independent sales organizations, technology vendors are beginning to respond. The latest example is Reno, Nev.-based Conformance Technologies LLC, which this week introduced more powerful tools to combat this growing fraud threat. Conformance has broadened the data elements …

Can the new version of 3D Secure fix the faults of the old one and stem the steady rise of e-commerce fraud? The answer is a big maybe—and here’s why. It has been nearly two decades since the card-network brands introduced 3-Domain Secure 1.0 in an attempt to offer a …

Contactless payments may seem like the next evolution of the U.S. payments industry, but the challenges confronting that technology may be greater than those of the ongoing chip migration, industry observers suggested on Tuesday at an industry trade show. “At the moment, contactless is much more complex, more expensive,” Allen …

They sell products, answer questions, and take payments in a process called conversational commerce. Just how much potential do chatbots really have? It’s been one of those days. You could use a drink. But you’re traveling on business, and you’re not sure where the local bars are. And you’re not …

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, …

Controversial from the start, the PCI Council faces a vastly changed security landscape from the one it confronted when it was born 10 years ago. Mobile payments, tokenization, and the growth of tech startups are new elements on the payments scene, but data breaches still abound, much as they did …