By John Stewart The rise of tokenization into a major payments business helps enable enterprises like Apple Pay and Android Pay but 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 …

Finding more ways to incorporate near-field communication (NFC) technology into everyday objects could eventually mean more payments. At least that’s the future as envisioned by panelists at the NFC Solutions Summit this week in Phoenix. Sponsored by the Smart Card Alliance, the conference examined ways NFC technology, which enables wireless …

In the four years since Visa Inc. announced the EMV liability shift would be Oct. 1, 2015, merchants, issuers, processors, and other parties have expended huge efforts to prepare for this day. But the real work—converting millions more merchants, issuing millions more chip cards, and educating merchants and consumers—is in …

Always conscious of keeping prices low, warehouse membership-club stores are tough customers for merchant acquirers and payments networks because they want to shave card-acceptance costs to the bone. So American Express Co., typically the most expensive card brand for merchants to accept, seemingly scored a coup when it announced that …

While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco shows cash still represents 40% of retail payments volume. The study found cash is the lowest-total-cost payment medium for a merchant to accept, simply because the fixed cost is pretty much a requirement for a retail store and the variable …

The EMV era in the U.S. officially started Oct. 1, and for the most part this is shaping up to be an underwhelming launch for chip cards. It’s morning in America for payment cards, the accession of the EMV chip card as the successor to the half-century-old magnetic-stripe card. The …

  Even though mobile wallets appear to be the better bet, card consolidators Coin, Swyp, and Stratos are sticking to their plans. Thumbing through a wallet trying to find the right payment card or loyalty card to rack up points at the cash register is an age-old experience for many …

U.S. merchants and their trade groups have been less than thrilled with how the banks and card networks have managed the EMV rollout, and on Tuesday they got in one last blast before the liability shift occurs two days from now. n In the conference call, Mallory Duncan, senior vice …

  Samsung Electronics America Inc.’s launch today of Samsung Pay, a mobile-payments service exclusive to its smart phones, could pose a quandary for consumers over whether they should choose Samsung Pay or Android Pay, Google Inc.’s mobile-payment service that wireless operators are loading onto the Android phones they sell. Samsung …