Arguing that a federal appeals court “disregarded the plain letter of the statute,” a group of merchants and merchant associations is preparing a request to the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case in which it is battling to overturn the Federal Reserve Board’s interpretation of the Durbin Amendment’s debit …

Vantiv-Mercury: Bad News for ISOs? Mercury Payment Systems LLC made its reputation as the leader in a rising niche of independent sales organizations that offer payment processing as part of business-management applications sold to merchants by software developers, dealers, and value-added resellers. In contrast, many ISOs still peddle straight payments …

Near-field communication for payments has floundered for years. Now, host card emulation promises to revive it by cutting out the mobile carrier. By John Stewart If zoologists studied payments critters, they would be astounded at the gestation period of near-field communication. Here is a powerful technology that has languished in …

  Payment card data remains a top target for criminals, but personally identifiable information, such as birth dates and addresses, is growing in favor among them, finds the 2014 edition of the Trustwave Global Security Report. Based on an analysis of 691 data-breach investigations conducted in 2013 by Chicago-based security-services …

Bitcoin may remain volatile and controversial, but the digital currency holds enough potential that it is starting to attract seasoned payments professionals, particularly in the business of merchant acceptance. Witness Bitnet, founded in January by a pair of former executives with payments processor CyberSource Corp. to make it easier for …

In an unusual tactic to thwart credit card fraud, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. nearly a year ago quietly implemented a policy in which its point-of-sale terminals prompt some cardholders to enter their card’s verification number, a code normally used for card-not-present transactions such as mail-order/telephone order (MOTO) and Internet purchases. The …

The Isis mobile-wallet consortium said Wednesday it is activating new wallets at the rate of 20,000 per day. That rate, achieved over the last 30 days, represents a doubling of the rate Isis saw in the previous 30-day period, the company said. The upbeat news from Isis comes as some …

Citing little enthusiasm by either consumers or merchants for contactless card payments, JPMorgan Chase & Co. has quietly begun informing cardholders that it is discontinuing its blink contactless program. While at first glance blink’s demise seems like a setback for chip-based card payments in the United States, it is unlikely …

By John Stewart With a crucial deadline looming in 2015, the U.S. payments industry will have only partially converted to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard by the end of that year. Indeed, it will likely take years to equip small merchants especially to accept EMV, according to a report …

Despite the impending loss of consumer payment cards from mega-bank JPMorgan Chase & Co., MasterCard Inc. is winning new business from U.S. card issuers, its top executives said Thursday at the No. 2 payment card network’s first-quarter earnings call. U.S. credit card purchase volume grew 8.1% year-over-year to $138 billion …