Plastic: High Growth, High Risk More than ever, plastic dominates the business of electronic payments in the United States, with two-thirds of all noncash transactions in 2012 occurring on a card, up substantially from 60% just three years earlier. That’s according to the Federal Reserve System’s triennial payments study, released …

Shopify Inc.’s recent move to offer its merchants a mobile point-of-sale application marks yet another entry in a market that has filled up fast with competitors ranging from PayPal Inc. to Square Inc. and dozens in between. “You would think we’d reached everybody [with mobile POS products], but we haven’t,” …

A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

By Kevin Woodward With the invasion of smart phones and tablets, the iconic payment terminal—and the entire point of sale—is getting a new look. Are the traditional terminal’s days numbered? Perhaps no other device serves as an icon of the payments industry like the point-of-sale terminal. Sitting on a merchant’s …

The Coin card, which officially launched last Thursday but is not yet available in the market, is generating a tidal wave of buzz in the press and on social-media sites but is not wowing payments experts contacted by Digital Transactions News. “It’s solving a problem that doesn’t really exist,” says …

To drive innovation and adoption, providers should stay close to the pain points of their customers. To achieve mass adoption of mobile payments, retailers, banks, and vendors must be prepared to serve a radically different customer, says Souheil Badran. Souheil Badran is senior vice president and general manager at Digital …

Ammo for ISOs in the Tablet Wars Independent sales organizations are starting to feel squeezed by technology companies selling tablet-based point-of-sale solutions to merchants, according to terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. So VeriFone last month rolled out a tablet-based platform for its resellers that they can price and market to …

Steve Mott Two years after Google’s splashy mobile-wallet debut, there are more wallets than ever, even though Google and others have stumbled. What’s wrong with current wallet strategies, and what kind of future do digital wallets have? If things go according to unofficial reports, the readers of this article will …

By John Stewart n Independent sales organizations are starting to feel squeezed by technology companies selling tablet-based point-of-sale solutions to merchants, according to terminal kingpin VeriFone Systems Inc. So VeriFone on Wednesday rolled out a tablet-based platform for its resellers that they can price and market to their merchants. n …

NFC Stalwart Isis Preps for a Rollout Isis, the smart-phone-based payments machine owned by three big mobile-telecommunications carriers, has stuck with near-field communication (NFC) through thick and thin while other mobile-payments providers have either avoided the high-powered but demanding technology altogether—think PayPal—or scaled back their commitment to it—think Google Inc. …