By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Gift card marketers have dominated the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions in recent years, but now a card is coming to thousands of those checkout-lane racks that will let budding investors buy or give away shares of stock in a favorite company.

• Processor Fiserv Inc. will market Early Warning LLC’s clearXchange person-to-person real-time payments network to its financial-institution clients under a new agreement. The deal follows a similar arrangement the companies reached last year for real-time bill payments and deposits. Fiserv also said adjusted second-quarter revenues in its payments segment increased nearly 11% …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday announced its Walmart Pay mobile wallet is now available in all of its 4,612 U.S. stores in all 50 states. The rollout’s completion comes about seven months after the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailing behemoth introduced the product and about 10 weeks after first making the app …

The Home Depot Inc.’s new lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. makes many of the same antitrust allegations that other merchants have lodged against the big networks in recent years. The suit, however, is notable for asking the court to quash Visa’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF) and, like …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s 400-store Canadian unit announced Saturday that it will no longer accept Visa payment cards in its stores beginning with phased discontinuance starting July 18. “Following an evaluation of credit card transaction fees in Canada and the rest of the world, we have concluded the fees applied to …

The latest battle between merchants and the major card brands has been brewing behind the scenes for months but went public Thursday when an advocacy group for big-box retailers charged that a new twist on network rules is slowing the progress of mobile payments. The controversy involves regulations long maintained …

Gift cards are hugely popular with consumers, and merchants that sell them are more than happy with the customer traffic, sales, and fees they generate. But the cards have been the target of a fraud-prevention crackdown in the first half of 2016. PayPal Holdings Inc. no longer will allow items …

Rewards and loyalty cards are now common in the U.S. payments landscape, but new research findings show just how popular such cards have become. A study by Phoenix Marketing International says 93% of all credit card spending is now done on rewards cards, up from 88% in 2013. A separate …

• Fitness-band vendor Fitbit Inc. has acquired the wearable-payments assets of Coin in a deal that closed May 12 and includes relevant personnel and intellectual property. Terms were not disclosed. Coin, which was part of a wearable-payments initiative announced earlier this year by MasterCard Inc., is best-known for a device that …

• Nearly half—48%—of ATM operators did not have EMV acceptance enabled on their machines at the end of 2015, finds the 2016 ATM Channel EMV Readiness Survey released by the ATM Industry Association. Fourteen months ago, the survey predicted that figure would be 12%. Continuing uncertainty and confusion, routing issues, and …