In the face of reports of generally mediocre mobile-wallet usage, a report issued this week indicates the picture may brighten soon. Thirty-nine percent of consumers have used a mobile-payments service in a store within the past year, and 73% of these have done so just within the past three months, …

Merchant processor First American Payment Systems L.P. on Thursday reported that it bought the independent sales organization portfolio of Chase Commerce Solutions, the merchant-acquiring and payment-processing unit of banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. Neither company would disclose the purchase price or the number of ISOs and merchants involved in the …

It was a lousy December for payment stocks, but 2015 as a whole saw shares of electronic transaction processors far outperform the major market indexes, according to a new report from Chicago-based investment firm Barrington Research Associates Inc. Shares of 28 payments companies posted a mean return of 11.47% last …

If history is any guide, card-not-present fraud will spike now that EMV has officially arrived in the United States. Can a growing array of fraud-prevention technologies stem the tide? When it comes to plying their deceptive trade, fraudsters exploit the weakest link in the security chain. With the EMV chip …

  ISOs trying to figure out what kind of gear to sell small businesses are discovering the first step toward wisdom involves educating their merchants. Until a couple of years ago, marketing messages for new point-of-sale equipment did not have to focus much on the technology, other than to say …

As 2015 drew to a close, it became clear that the business of creating and processing tokens in place of actual card credentials has hit the big time. Three of the major general-purpose card networks—American Express Co., MasterCard Inc., and Visa Inc.—have now created so-called digital-enablement services that handle token …

As the EMV reality squeezes card fraudsters out of the card-present business, they are all crowding into the online racket. U.S. retailers should be ready. With retailers seeking advice about this, the first question I ask usually raises eyebrows. I don’t ask about protocols or gadgets. I ask to check …

What do industry leaders foresee for 2016? Many feel the number of announcements will level off, but there will be a few big, even game-changing, ones. Drew Luca, a partner at PwC, feels we will see mobile-payments companies undergoing the industry consolidation and interoperability that is necessary to fulfill the …

The real reason mobile payments haven’t taken off is that they haven’t offered anyone a compelling reason to replace cash or cards, says Nick Holland. Around 15 years ago, I wrote a thesis on the potential for mobile payments using radio-frequency ID technologies, such as Bluetooth and the recently announced …

Visa Inc. has announced new data-security requirements for small merchants, one of which says that beginning Jan. 31, 2017, merchant acquirers must annually validate compliance by their so-called Level 4 merchants with the Payment Card Industry data security standard. Other new Visa requirements involve qualified integrators and resellers, or QIRs. …