Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. appears to have bought tablet and mobile point-of-sale provider GoPago Inc., according to a report in La Repubblica, an Italy-based newspaper. In the report, Vincenzo Di Nicola, a GoPago co-founder and its chief technology officer, says Amazon paid an undisclosed amount for the company. The article, …

While questions remain concerning when it will launch and how it will work, the Merchant Customer Exchange mobile-payments venture continues to sign up retail companies large and small. And in a twist unique to MCX, with each merchant it signs for acceptance it apparently fences off that merchant from competing …

Online commerce has hit a trifecta of sorts. New Jersey on Tuesday became the third state, in addition to Nevada and Delaware, to allow some forms of online gaming. And with its debut, more payments companies are at work on providing services to gaming operators and their users. n Registered …

So far, the passes have chopped an average of 15 seconds off drive-up service times for the close to 600 customers who have registered their devices for the program. “That’s huge for us,” Stephen Baclini, president of Rawson Food Service, which operates six Wendy’s stores on the island, tells Digital …

  Consumers with compatible smart phones now can load the Isis mobile wallet onto their devices and pay with a tap anywhere contactless payments are accepted in the United States. Isis is a payment scheme backed by wireless carriers AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA. The smart-phone wallet, which …

A wider array of payment cards and more finely targeted advertising are among the features and capabilities the Isis mobile-payments venture previewed on Thursday for possible launch in 2014, following the venture's national rollout. In pulling back the curtain, however, the venture, which is backed by mobile-network behemoths AT&T Mobility, …

Independent sales organizations and other acquirers could exploit Google Inc.’s move to decouple mobile payments based on near-field communication technology from a phone-based secure element, observers say. At the same time, much depends on how the mobile carriers, which have held tight control over the secure element, react to Google’s …

Should Discover Financial Services sell its network business? That’s the intriguing question raised by an analyst at investment-banking firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in a report assessing how mobile devices and related technologies are rapidly reshaping the payments industry. Sanjay Sakhrani, a managing director at New York City-based KBW, argues …

Token Specs: Curb Your Enthusiasm The three biggest card networks would just like everybody to calm down. As dramatic as their joint tokenization announcement was last month, key officials with Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and American Express Co. have been at pains to tamp down the far-reaching industry speculation the …

Some dragons are harder to slay than others, and a few are fire-breathing. Here’s our annual look at the industry’s fiercest beasts, this time ranging from the endless war over interchange to eager-beaver regulators to the woes of digital currency. By John Stewart and Jim Daly If payments were easy, …