By Kevin Woodward It’s that time of year when shopper impatience tends to flare, especially when scores of consumers are waiting in long checkout lines. According to a new survey from merchant-services provider Harbortouch, many consumers are willing to try something new to alleviate their displeasure with lines. A majority …

A filing Tuesday by First Data Corp. in the wake of its recent initial public offering of stock paints a picture of a payment processor growing in many areas but still carrying a heavy debt load and challenged on profitability. The filing, Atlanta-based First Data’s quarterly report to the Securities …

Prepaid card issuer and services provider Green Dot Corp. on Thursday said it is over the hump of business lost when it closed its popular MoneyPak reload product early this year. MoneyPak was a long-established product that Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot sold in stores to enable the reloading of prepaid …

Just as Visa Inc. prepares to swallow up the 38-country Visa Europe system, at least one market researcher has released a report expressing some doubt about how long Visa and its bank card rival, MasterCard Inc., will be able to maintain their share of card-accepting merchants around the world. On …

Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are shelling out ever more dollars to buy issuer loyalty and induce merchants to route transactions onto their networks. A Digital Transactions News analysis shows the two leading payment card networks are on track to spend approximately $6.75 billon on so-called rebates and incentives in …

Late September saw the introduction of two more major third-party mobile wallets. One is called Android Pay and comes from Google Inc. The other is called Samsung Pay and comes from, well, Samsung, which just happens to make some pretty popular smart phones that run on Android. Meanwhile, a consortium …

The rise of tokenization into a major payments business helps enable mobile services like Apple Pay and Android Pay. But it could also pose a threat to the financial institutions that have historically issued the majority of the cards consumers use most often. That threat lies in the fact that, …

Offering value-added services and focusing on the right merchant categories can boost profits and take the sting out of portfolio attrition. Talk of margin compression is nothing new for merchant acquirers. The ongoing race for merchants between acquirers, independent sales organizations, and merchant aggregators has led many players into a …

2015 is the year of EMV, as much for the various ways chip cards are causing anxiety for the payments business as for their putative benefits. But a host of other issues is keeping payments executives awake these days, as well. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the …

  Developing a self-pay app is fairly straightforward. The tough part might be waiting for merchants and consumers to catch up. It doesn’t take much to imagine miniaturizing the large cash wraps found in home-improvement and grocery stores that consumers use to scan and pay for their own merchandise. The …