The Networks’ Signature Charade The card brands should stop pushing signatures and start working with merchants to implement effective authentication, says Mark Horwedel. Merchants view the EMV migration as an opportunity to eliminate an outdated process that inflicts billions of dollars in damages on consumers and merchants. Few things ruffle …

Visa Inc. can now process a peak volume of 56,000 messages per second—a record high—and foresees no glitches resulting from a new card-number masking technology expected to go into production some time this fall. Visa arrived at these results upon completing an annual stress test earlier this month in anticipation …

Target Corp. on Wednesday reported second-quarter financials reflecting its lowered expectations, but the discount retailer’s top brass also shed some light on how the massive data breach Target disclosed last December affected consumers’ applications for and usage of its private-label payment cards, particularly its debit card. Target’s results confirm that …

  In a recent blog post, Square Inc. is attempting to counter some of the attention foisted on Amazon.com Inc. after the announcement last week of Local Register, the online retailer’s mobile point-of-sale service, by dispelling the “top 10 myths” about Square’s service. Local Register enables retailers to accept payment …

Rather than jumping to conclusions about the implications of Square Inc.’s decision last week to implement a Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card solution that forgoes PINs and instead relies on a signature at the point of sale, it’s important to first ask the question: Why would a payments disruptor and tech …

Target Corp. on Tuesday issued an update on its data-breach expenses for the second quarter that brings total costs to $236 million, including expenses in the first quarter and late 2013. The Minneapolis-based retailer expects gross breach-related expenses in the second quarter to be $148 million, offset by $38 million …

Top executives at MasterCard Inc. on Thursday trumpeted the card network’s gains with MasterPass, its digital wallet, and downplayed the impact of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s ongoing conversion to Visa Inc. Introduced two years ago, MasterPass is now operating in 10 countries with “tens of thousands” of merchants and will …

Square Inc. on Wednesday ended months of speculation with an announcement that it will begin offering an EMV card reader early next year. Square will start taking orders for the device, which will process chip-and-signature as well as mag-stripe transactions, later this year, the San Francisco-based company said. The move comes …

  Merchant groups and payment-industry members both want to use tokenization to make it tougher for criminals to get to sensitive cardholder data, but a disagreement has erupted about the best way to do that. On Monday, the Food Marketing Institute, Merchant Advisory Group, National Association of Convenience Stores, National …

Visa Inc. moved on Thursday to commercialize mobile payments using cloud-based near-field communication technology with its release of Visa Cloud Payment Solutions. A related development, the announcement of the upcoming debut of a tokenization service, is aimed at locking down cloud-based NFC and other digital payments. The new services include …