Hey, mobile-payments types: the fraudsters  are gunning for you. What are you doing to keep fraud at bay? So far, the known mobile-payments security lapses have proven to be more embarrassments than the truly damaging data breaches seen with more conventional payment methods. For example, Square Inc. initially passed out …

Lauri Giesen When the Durbin rate cap on debit took effect, it was supposed to give merchants a big break on acceptance costs. But sellers of items like soda and bus fares have seen their costs balloon, and that’s hurting emerging-payments markets. Lower costs are what most retailers should have …

PayPal Inc. on Thursday announced that 15 more retailers had joined its point-of-sale initiative, which means the No. 1 alternative-payments provider is now more than three-quarters of the way toward meeting its stated goal of having 20 national retailers accepting PayPal at physical stores by the end of 2012. PayPal …

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U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of the now-famous amendment bearing his name that upended the debit card industry, made a figurative trip to court this week to show his support for retailers challenging the Federal Reserve Board’s final rule implementing his provision in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. In a friend of …

Nearly a year after major U.S. rivals introduced mobile wallets, MasterCard Inc. officially entered the market on Monday with a service that aims to trump competing products by being open to a wide range of payment brands and by offering tools that can let third parties develop their own digital …

There’s no federal edict to replace fraud-prone magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards with the more secure EMV chip card, but the payment card networks have unveiled various plans in the past year to encourage U.S card issuers, merchant acquirers, and merchants to board the EMV train. Exactly how a U.S. …

Quick—which of these five common financial products was the only one to grow last year: credit cards, debit cards, prepaid cards, checking accounts, or personal savings accounts? If you answered “prepaid cards,” give yourself a gold star. New research from Javelin Strategy & Research says fewer consumers in 2011 reported …

Peter Lucas The creature of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers dumped its payments-network strategy a year ago, and now things are looking up for its mobile wallet. The key difference: an emphasis on offers and rewards. It won’t be long before the eyes of the payment industry focus on Salt …

Lauri Giesen As EFT networks hunt for new business in the era of the Durbin Amendment, MoneyPass is expanding beyond its comfortable ATM space to link banks to point-of-sale PIN-debit services. Most of the headlines in the general press about the Durbin Amendment in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform law focused …