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 …

Zooz Mobile Ltd. is preparing to launch in September a transaction-routing engine that will let so-called omnichannel merchants run payments for e-commerce, mobile commerce, and in-store commerce through a single pipe. The engine, tentatively called the Omnichannel Generator, will seek out the optimal path for each transaction, allowing merchants to …

Seeking to contrast the merchant-acquiring industry’s actual practices with the impression created by the government’s Operation Choke Point that acquirers turn a blind eye to shady merchants, the industry’s leading trade group on Monday said its members last year discharged more than 10,000 merchants for fraud. That statistic comes from …

The U.S. Department of Justice’s controversial Operation Choke Point, an effort to cut off high-risk merchants’ access to electronic payments by challenging the banks and processors that serve them, continues to draw fire. The latest missile comes in the form of a bill from U.S. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, R-Mo., who …

You Said How Many EMV Cards? The conversion of U.S. magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard is finally under way, but just how quickly most Americans will be carrying smart cards is a matter of debate. Citing reports from industry suppliers, the EMV Migration …

The technology to deposit checks into prepaid cards or mobile wallets using a smart phone is less than two years old, but already the channel is proving to be 33 times more prone to fraud than mobile deposits into bank accounts, according to data from Fidelity National Information Services Inc. …

The merchant cash-advance and non-bank small-business loan sectors have boomed in recent years, with startups, established providers, and PayPal Inc. all seeking to tap merchant demand for capital that banks haven’t met. Now comes merchant processor Square Inc. with a new merchant cash-advance (MCA) service called Square Capital. As it …

Card-not-present merchants contending with the double-digit growth of e-commerce and mobile commerce often face more exposure to fraudulent transactions. Vesta Corp., an Alpharetta, Ga.-based payments-security company, says its new payment gateway vSafe can help reduce that fraud. n The gateway relies on data from more than 1 billion transactions made …

A revised set of network fees from Visa Inc. could hit merchant aggregators hard when the revisions take effect next April, according to payments-industry sources. Depending on the size and number of aggregators’ sponsored merchants, the revisions could significantly boost actual fee payments as well as drive up programming and …

Payments industry professionals attending one of the four regional acquiring conferences can expect to see more from the Electronic Transactions Association at the events. n “This is a conscious effort on the part of the ETA to participate, support them, and engage in mutually beneficial activities,” Oxman tells Digital Transactions …