Interac, Canada’s debit network, has made it easier to digitally send money direct to another bank account through its e-Transfer service by eliminating the need for recipients to answer a security question each time a transfer is made. Answering a security question validates the recipient to whom the money is …

The current wave of buying and selling is the right prescription at the right time for a business that badly needed shaking up, says O.B. Rawls. For decades, the payments industry was pretty stagnant, but over the past decade, and even more so recently, that has changed drastically. Now part …

Whether the legacy payments players like it or not, the case is strong for much greater intervention by the Fed in improving payments. With July’s release of Part Two of the Faster Payments Task Force Final Report, which speculated that near real-time payments could/should be on the payments scene by …

Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …

Acquiring TIO Networks gives PayPal an all-important launchpad for reaching consumers underserved by banks. How will it leverage that asset? PayPal Holdings Inc.’s $233-million acquisition of Vancouver-based processor TIO Networks Corp., which was finalized in July, does more than make the digital-payments system an immediate player in the bill-payment market. …

The first big wave of Apple Pay contracts began expiring last month, and a big question for both Apple Inc. and the financial institutions that committed to support the computing giant’s mobile-payments app is whether to renew, and under what terms, in the face of less-than-spectacular results for mobile payments …

Mastercard Inc. enjoyed a strong third quarter, and Tuesday morning its top executive was not shy about celebrating some of the trends that he expects will further lift results for the world’s second-largest payment card network. These include recent acquisitions, a global partnership with PayPal Holdings Inc., and budding developments …

Most components of First Data Corp.’s massive merchant-acquiring machine performed well in the third quarter, and the company renewed its acquiring contract with Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer. But new merchant referrals from First Data’s joint ventures with three big U.S. banks remain problematic. “These businesses have remained …

Consumer use of mobile payments has taken a step back, according to new research from Auriemma Consulting Group. The New York City-based firm found that mobile-payments usage is down 5 percentage points to 25% of consumers surveyed from 30% a year ago. And that decline is expected to continue into …

A Cincinnati-based startup called LISNR is promoting technology that transmits payment data over sound waves. The technology, which the company demonstrated Tuesday at the Money 20/20 financial-technology conference in Las Vegas, is now open for beta and can be used as an alternative to near-field communication, the company said. It …