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  It’s back to the future, and in many cases higher merchant-acceptance costs for transactions at or under $15, with the bank card networks’ new debit card interchange schedules that will take effect Saturday. That’s the same date that regulated interchange pricing under the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank …

  NCR Corp. bolstered its position at the point of sale this week by announcing a deal to buy Radiant Systems Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash. Alpharetta, Ga.-based Radiant Systems is a specialist in POS software and hardware for various merchant segments, especially the hospitality industry and specialty retailers. …

  Altering consumer behavior for a complete move away from the payment card is realistically years and years in the future.   Far from getting in the way of chip-and-PIN card adoption in the U.S. market, mobile payments at the point of sale will actually help pave the way for …

  Cover Story Mobile-payment schemes proliferate but innovations abound in all corners of the new world of electronic-payment systems competing for consumer and merchant adoption.   By John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Linda Punch       We’re putting on weight. First published in 2009, Digital Transactions’ Field Guide to …

The announcements last week that two top-10 U.S. banks will soon start issuing smart cards based on the EMV chip card standard, while largely symbolic for now, could herald bigger deployments later on. Normal banking competition, meanwhile, could also bring more U.S. banks to issue chip cards, bank executives and …

Trends & Tactics   No Apocalypse Now—Or Later—for Debit As Digital Transactions went to press this month, the ultimate extent and timing of the debit restrictions contained in the Durbin Amendment remained unclear. Final rules had not yet issued from the Federal Reserve, and in mid-March a bill appeared in …

Acquiring Peter Lucas The low margins earned on vending-machine sales have historically worked against card acceptance. But now, with evidence of a sales lift from cards, processors and gateways are pushing into vending harder than ever. It’s a frequent scenario: A family is out for fun at an amusement park. …

The debut on Wednesday of Apple Inc.’s iPad 2 ushers in a thinner, lighter version of a tablet computer that debuted a year ago to considerable fanfare both generally and in the payments business. Like its sister product, the iPhone, the iPad won adoption by some merchants looking for ways …

By Lauri Giesen PayPal, followed by Visa and MasterCard, have thrown open their networks to outside developers, sparking a geyser of payments innovation while slicing R&D costs. Why didn’t they do this a long time ago? You’ve heard of open platforms. Well, now they’re coming to the payments business—and with …