In its latest move toward becoming a force in electronic payments, social network Twitter Inc. reported Monday that it is starting a test allowing members to make purchases via tweets from 28 partners that include merchants, rock bands and non-profits. “For a small percentage of U.S. users (that will grow …

Bitcoin Shop Inc. runs an e-commerce marketplace offering about 140,000 products, which on the face of it isn’t all that remarkable. What sets the 1-year-old site apart, though, is that it accepts only digital currency. No cards or bank-account transfers, please, just Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. But Arlington, Va.-based Bitcoin …

Mobile-payments providers have looked to offers and rewards as a means of engaging with consumers and merchants and boosting payments activity. Indeed, most mobile strategists value the technology’s ability to deliver rewards at the moment consumers are in the store, if not necessarily in front of the relevant merchandise. But …

MasterCard Sees Dollars in Tokens As mobile payments and the use of tokens for payment security grow, at least one card network is seeing an opportunity for new fee revenue. MasterCard Inc. is planning new “digital enablement” fees, one for merchant acquirers and others for card issuers. The fees are …

Is it Still Hip to Be Square? The answer, after five eventful years, is yes. But it needs to find a consumer strategy, and right now there’s no app for that. Nobody in the staid world of the payments business had ever seen anything like it before. Dozens of buttoned-down …

Unintended But Predictable The U.S. arrival of EMV virtually ensures criminals will step up attacks on card-not-present channels, which EMV doesn’t protect. So what is the industry doing to defend itself? Just about everywhere that Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards have replaced magnetic-stripe payment cards, greatly strengthening the shield protecting brick-and-mortar …

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 Merchants view the EMV migration as an opportunity to eliminate an outdated process that inflicts billions of dollars in damages on consumers and merchants.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 …

Apple Inc. is expected to release its iPhone 6 next month and, not surprisingly, speculation about the coming smart phone’s features is intense. But a new report from IDC Financial Insights cautions that Apple is not out to reshape the mobile-payments industry. Many of the rumors in payments circles center …

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 …

  Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. is moving into brick-and-mortar stores with the debut Wednesday of its Local Register mobile point-of-sale service. Similar to other mobile POS services, such as Square Inc.’s, Local Register requires merchants to create an account, purchase a card reader and download an app to a …