The automated clearing house network remains a huge and critical payments player, but its initiatives don’t grab headlines like mobile payments or even prepaid cards do. So just what is the ACH up to these days? By Jim Daly For the automated clearing house, it’s tough trying to get …

  It was announced with considerable fanfare almost a year ago, but since then little has been heard about the person-to-person payment service created by three of the nation’s top banks. Is clearXchange at risk of falling behind the competition? By Linda Punch When three powerhouses in financial services and …

  What merchants increasingly want from an independent sales organization  is an all-in-one application developer, provider of business solutions,  and bundler of mobile and e-commerce data.  Forward-thinking ISOs are the ones that can tick off those boxes. By Peter Lucas Having difficulty figuring out the definition of an independent sales …

Amazon.com Inc. quietly killed its PayPhrase online-authentication service on Feb. 20, not quite two-and-a-half years after introducing the system. The PayPhrase credentials system allowed online shoppers to check out using only a word or phrase of their choosing and a PIN that they had registered with the Amazon Payments service. …

Financial institutions have much to gain from fees and cost savings if they offer person-to-person payments and get it right, according to representatives of three leading P2P networks who spoke on a panel at a banking conference on Monday. The keys to getting this relatively nascent payment form right lie …

Backers of mobile-payments programs are more than ever relying on merchants to foot the cost of rewards and offers. But for merchants to buy in, the rules of the game have to change. By Jane Adler As the mobile-payments business gets off the ground and card issuers look for new …

With both Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. now on the record with plans to encourage the adoption of EMV chip card and mobile payments in the U.S, it seems all but certain that the magnetic-stripe payment card’s days are numbered. In fact, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. already is seeing some EMV …

Virtual Currencies: Bust-Out Ahead? Witness the recent travails of the euro if you want proof of how hard it is for any new currency, even a physical currency backed by multiple governments, to attain and retain widespread usage and acceptance. The obstacles blocking the new breed of electronic currencies from …

Government authorities are demanding better merchant underwriting and transaction monitoring by payment processors in order to prevent consumer fraud. A laudable goal, but at what cost? by Jim Daly Almost two years ago, a Federal Trade Commission official made it known to a meeting of merchant-acquiring executives that their industry …

n A payments executive for Sinclair Oil outlines her frustrations with data security—and argues for a major upgrade to EMV. by Trinette Huber We’ve all been hearing a lot about EMV, or chip card technology, lately as some banks and merchants actually issue chip cards and install the terminals that …