Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards have entered the classic phase of huge percentage growth from a very small base, according to new U.S. figures from Visa Inc. The leading network this week reported that American financial institutions had issued 3.5 million Visa-branded EMV cards as of March 31, an increase of …

  World War I was supposed to be the war that ended all wars. It didn’t, of course. And the settlement announced last July that was supposed to end lawsuits over bank card interchange and related network rules not only is failing to end litigation between merchants and the card …

  Can merchants make payment applications that run on smart phones secure? Yes, but only after they take some steps they might find to be difficult, according to an expert steeped in the intricacies of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI). “Smart phones were not built for taking payments, …

  With the United States playing catch-up with Canada and much of Europe in deploying chip card technology, security firms are starting to respond to online operators’ fears that the arrival of chips at the point of sale will drive fraud to the Internet. One of the latest of these …

Atlanta-based InComm, a major provider of plastic gift card programs, will be gaining a bigger presence in the growing digital card market through its acquisition announced on Wednesday of Portland, Ore.-based Giftango Corp. Although both companies are involved in managing plastic and digital gift card programs for retailers, InComm had …

Square Inc.’s announcement over the weekend that it is making digital gift cards available for its base of mostly small merchants heralded the San Francisco startup’s entry into what is turning into a hot market, particularly with the onset of the holiday-shopping season. Square, which in recent months revamped its …

Jim Daly The Royal Canadian Mint held a first-of-its-kind competition this year to spawn ideas for virtual cash. Could some of these ideas solve the problem of the high cost of low-value electronic payments? From Silicon Valley to India, almost the entire world is bubbling with new ideas for electronic …

Discover Financial Services is about to team up with Google Inc. to bring the Google Wallet to the physical point of sale with a Discover-branded plastic card, according to the latest rumor sweeping Silicon Valley. Discover recently began issuing cards for PayPal Inc., so if the Google rumor proves true, …

Linda Punch New authentication tools and other technologies are dimming the once-bright line between card-present and card-not-present transactions. Will the card networks take note of that trend any time soon? In an era of mobile wallets, tap-and-go, and other alternative payments using devices other than traditional cards and card readers, …

The massive deal PayPal Inc. and Discover Financial Services announced on Wednesday that will bring online-payments leader PayPal to 7 million physical U.S. merchant locations has all the hallmarks of electronic payments in the 21st Century’s second decade, including digital wallets and cloud-based technology. But the foundation of the deal …