American Express Co. said fintech Knot is testing a new feature that enables select AmEx cardholders to add their payment information at participating merchants, including Bloomingdale’s, Hilton, and Macy’s. With Knot, AmEx can enable its customers to update card-on-file information instantly, AmEx said, using Knot’s CardSwitcher technology and proprietary AmEx tech. …

Payments-technology provider Opus Technologies Inc. has launched Paysemble, a suite of apps that are meant to streamline payment integration for financial institutions and merchants. A cloud-based solution, Paysemble allows businesses to consolidate payments from multiple channels through interoperable message hubs, configurable security, and batch processing. As a result, businesses can …

Electronic Merchant Systems LLC is teaming up with LegitScript to give its health-care merchants access to a certification tag, while InvoiceCloud says Western National Insurance Group picked it for a new digital-payment and policyholder-relations service. Cleveland-based EMS, which processes approximately $6 billion in annual volume for 25,000 merchants, says the …

The bill may look sensible on the surface. But it’s a mistake to try conjuring up competition by diktat. Since his unsuccessful efforts in 2008 and 2009 to impose price controls on merchants’ card-acceptance costs, longtime payments-industry nemesis Sen. Ricard Durbin, D-Ill., has been on a crusade to gut the …

What happens in Illinois won’t stay in Illinois, whose new law exempting merchants from card interchange on sales tax and tips poses a whole host of technical and operational questions for processors nationwide. Bills that would exempt merchants from paying interchange on sales tax for credit card purchases have been …

The increasing complexity of modern payments can be managed effectively through a relatively new entrant in the transaction chain. Merchants have to deal with an increasingly complex payments ecosystem. Companies are looking for the flexibility to harmonize their payments processing, profit from local market conditions for better authorization rates and …

Merchants’ disdain for interchange is well documented, but one aspect of card-acceptance costs that gets drowned out by the outcry over interchange is that rising processing fees are hitting merchants harder than interchange hikes, according to some observers. Processors’ rate hikes have been running between 0.25% and 1.5% in recent …

The iPhone maker will finally allow developers to access the device’s NFC chip and secure element. Will this trigger a payments bonanza in Cupertino? Ten years after the first iPhone with an NFC chip to enable Apple Pay launched, Apple is opening access to the chip to third-party developers. Apple …

High card-acceptance fees are the root cause for why some merchants are charging consumers for cash back at the point-of-sale, a service merchants have historically provided consumers even though customers can make purchases with their debit cards at no charge, says the Merchants Payment Coalition. Driving the trend is that …

Paze, the online checkout service from Early Warning Services LLC, says consumers that belong to the Sephora loyalty program can now use it to pay for transactions on the retailer’s Web site. Backed by some of the nation’s largest banks, Paze is an expedited checkout service that includes addresses and …