The liability shift by which merchants not prepared to accept EMV chip cards now must bear responsibility for counterfeit card fraud has given rise to a federal antitrust lawsuit seeking class-action status for merchants. The 47-page complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, comes …

MasterCard Inc. reportedly wants to acquire VocaLink Ltd., operator of the United Kingdom’s Faster Payments system, for just under £1 billion ($1.4 billion), according to reports in the British media Thursday. Such a deal, if consummated, could shake up the budding faster-payments movement in the U.S., where VocaLink is building …

Frequently, we see articles and blogs about the disruption of businesses where the example disruptor is Uber or Airbnb or a similar platform company. In these cases, the business model is connecting a consumer with a provider and leveraging a platform that the disruptor doesn’t have to fund or manage. …

Cash, it seems, remains king, especially among younger consumers who want to use person-to-person payments. Of the 1,000 18-to-34-year-old U.S. consumers surveyed, 58% prefer cash for their P2P payments, says GoBankingRates.com, a financial-services site that conducted the online survey in January. The popularity of cash, even among Millennials, for P2P …

HalCash North America is making its cardless-cash ATM service available in four U.S. cities prior to eventual national expansion later this year. Under the Pin4 moniker, the HalCash North America service enables consumers to securely send cash that recipients can retrieve at participating ATMs without having to insert a card …

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced its own mobile wallet, Chase Pay, in October, it said the new payments service would begin rolling out by the middle of this year, and on Tuesday the money-center bank announced an important step in that direction. The fledgling service, which is up against …

Payments made via so-called wearables are forecast to soar in the years to come, so Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are positioning themselves to cash in with announcements made Monday at the huge Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. MasterCard unveiled a partnership with WiseKey, a Swiss company whose security …

A new Tennessee law governing merchants’ payment card contracts could create headaches for non-bank entities such as independent sales organizations and payment facilitators, merchant-acquiring industry sources say. The law will require processors on a monthly basis to list all fees assessed since the last statement. That’s certainly not unusual in …

A new data element is getting a lot of discussion in merchant-acquiring and mobile-payments circles. It’s the so-called Payment Account Reference, or PAR, and it’s meant to associate all the payment tokens linked to a single credit or debit card primary account number, or PAN. But implementing PAR could be …

In a move that recognizes the powerful role application developers play in the global payments arena, Visa Inc. on Thursday opened scores of its application programming interfaces to thousands of outsiders worldwide, including merchants, banks, and technology companies. The new program, called Visa Developer, embraces some 155 APIs and includes …