By John Stewart n If, as the saying goes, cash is king, it’s clinging stubbornly to its throne. Despite the emergence of e-commerce and the secular rise of payment cards around the world, cash usage is growing nearly as fast globally as cashless payments, according to a report released this …

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee on Tuesday afternoon was scheduled to consider a data-security bill that is drawing fire from merchant trade groups and consumer advocates, but which has the support of the American Bankers Association. H.R. 2205, the Data Security Act of 2015, was introduced last …

Apple Inc. stole headlines for a while last month when reports surfaced that it was planning to launch a person-to-person payments service. Those reports are unconfirmed so far, but the opportunity for Apple and all the mobile and online players lies in one glaring fact: Payments between individuals are still …

Clear away the coin part, and what Bitcoin invented may very well be a better infrastructure for payments: the blockchain. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that logs and confirms transactions based on user consensus. To paraphrase Sarah Martin of the Digital Currency Council, blockchain is a distributed database and …

  With the POS conversion in progress, the next step is to accommodate EMV chip cards in ATMs. That will require planning, money, and expertise. With the EMV liability shift for the point of sale well under way, the next big step in the transformation of the U.S. payment industry …

By John Stewart Last month, the spotlight shone on Merchant Customer Exchange LLC when JPMorgan Chase & Co. officially unveiled its Chase Pay wallet, set to launch next year, and said it will be included in MCX’s merchant-controlled CurrentC application. But, as big as that deal is for MCX, the …

Fears about fraud losses from duplicate check deposits have plagued mobile remote deposit capture since its inception. Finding data to confirm or debunk those fears, however, has been tough, at least until now. It seems that mRDC fraud is pretty low, according to results of an April-May survey that Alpharetta, …

Is Apple Inc. laying the groundwork for an application that would let individuals pay each other electronically? Citing “people familiar with the matter,” The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that the tech kingpin is doing just that, and has already started talking to a handful of major banks. If the …

By John Stewart As the holidays approach, retailers and banks can expect to sell more electronic gift cards than ever, if research released Monday by Bankrate.com is any indication. The survey, which covers 60 general-purpose and proprietary gift cards, shows two-thirds are available as e-cards, up from 59% last year. …

When it comes to payments between individuals, cash and checks are still wildly popular, even among Millennials, despite years of penetration by online and mobile methods. Indeed, 71% of consumers made at least one person-to-person payment with cash last year, and 56% did so with a check, according to a …