Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

  PayPal’s Triangulation Strategy   It was Visa Inc. that popularized “It’s Everywhere You Want To Be” as its slogan years ago, but these days it appears to be PayPal Inc. that’s living up to the old tagline.   First, the San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc. unit established itself as …

Surpassing the 1-billion mark for the first time represents “a real milestone for the industry,” Brian Russell, an SPA representative, said on Monday at the Cartes North America conference in Las Vegas. Russell is a senior vice president at Giesecke & Devrient, one of the SPA’s members. The other five …

n Square Inc. kept up the pressure on the traditional merchant-acquiring industry on Monday by introducing a souped-up version of its iPad app for brick-and-mortar merchants called Square Register with enhanced business-management functions. Meanwhile, the Isis mobile-payments venture announced it has struck deals with the major U.S. point-of-sale terminal makers …

A Comeback for Credit Cards Online Thanks in part to debit card regulation, e-commerce shoppers in the next few years will reverse a recent trend away from credit, according to new research. General-purpose credit cards will capture 40% of online spending in 2011 and 2012, level with 2010, but that …

Led by Apple's iPad, the rise of tablet computers is opening new card-acceptance options for merchants. Are they a disruptive force? Jim Daly Less than two years ago, the space in the portable computer market between smart phones on the small end and laptops on the large end was occupied …

  Payments startup Dwolla Corp. eliminated its transaction fee last week on all payments under $10, a bold move in itself, but it apparently has much bigger things in store. For one thing, the Des Moines, Iowa-based company is testing a system that co-founder Ben Milne says will make automated …

  By Peter Lucas   As check volume dwindles, processors and banks are scrambling to find new ways to leverage the fixed costs of their check-image archives.       It’s no secret that paper-check volume is in steady decline. Thanks to the growing popularity of electronic payments, the number …

  Visa Inc. will launch its digital wallet product some time early in 2012, but contactless-payment capability won’t be part of the wallet until the second half of the year, a Visa executive responsible for the product tells Digital Transactions News. The first release of the wallet, which Visa is …

  By Jane Adler   The payments industry has made great strides in the area of security, but malicious computer code is still an ever-evolving threat to processors and merchants.       For a restaurant manager, Gary Sipp knows a whole lot about malicious computer software, usually referred to …