The carrier-led mobile-payments consortium, news of which became publicly available on Monday, may break new ground in bringing payments based on near-field communication (NFC) to market. But it could confront major issues in attracting merchants, especially the big chain retailers looking to chop transaction costs, says one expert observer who …

The rich in merchant-acquiring market share got richer last year, but nearly everyone got a little poorer when same-store sales are the measure, according to the latest annual study of the acquiring industry by Mercator Advisory Group Inc. The top five acquirers processed 74% of U.S. general-purpose payment card charge …

Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc.'s sales force will begin selling the company's new end-to-end encryption system in the second quarter following testing that began last June, the company says. Heartland also says several terminal manufacturers are integrating the technological protocols of its system, which was developed by Voltage Security …

In its effort to become a major supplier for merchants seeking to use their iPhones from Apple Inc. as payment card-accepting terminals, VeriFone Holdings Inc. already has announced a major marketing initiative for its PAYware Mobile system that includes a software application on Apple Inc.'s iTunes App Store and a …

U.S. card issuers are starting to worry about problems some of their high-spending and corporate card customers are having using their magnetic-stripe cards in countries that support the chip-and-PIN standard, according to executives who spoke on Tuesday at a smart card conference. Whereas the issue hardly seemed apparent only a …

Here's one way credit card issuers could win back some popularity in an increasingly debit card world: make credit cards function like debit cards. That's the essence of a new product from processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), which last week unveiled its TSYS Hybrid card. The patent-pending product enables …

End-to-end encryption of cardholder account data during the transaction process is an imperfect solution to payment card fraud, but it's the most practical out there now for the U.S., a new report about fraud management from Aite Group LLC concludes. The report estimates that fraud cost the U.S. card industry …

Payment card processing glitches struck in the U.S., Germany, and Australia over the past week. Although full details about them still aren't known, the foreign ones apparently involved applications that couldn't properly handle the change in year on Jan. 1?problems eerily reminiscent of those predicted in the late 1990s during …

U.S. payment card issuers missed out on nearly $4 billion in charge volume in 2008, including $78.7 million in interchange, because of problems cardholders had with their cards while traveling abroad, according to a new report by Aite Group LLC. The default response when travelers have a card problem is …

Will the 2010 iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard represent a major break from the current version or just have some minor changes? That's the question before the card networks, merchants, merchant acquirers, and payment processors now that one meeting with PCI stakeholders is down and another is …