Chatbot developer Kasisto Inc. has agreed to provide a so-called smartbot for Varo Money Inc., a San Francisco-based provider of a mobile-only banking app. Both the app and the bot are in beta testing and expected to launch early next year. The new bot, called Val, is based on conversational …

Few consumers like waiting in lines to pay, especially at grocery stores. One California grocery chain is taking steps to make it easier for shoppers pay for their purchases with the launch of a self-checkout app. The California Fresh Market location in San Luis Opisbo, Calif., is using Future Proof …

Fintech—Patti Hewitt, a.k.a. Paymentgal, observes that financial institutions need to reinvent the retail account to offer more than just the simple liquidity they’ve provided “for centuries.” She sees the bank-customer relationship itself as up for grabs. The reason is the rise of fintech, well-funded non-bank financial-services startups with deep technology …

All the talk about real-time transactions has focused on non-card rails. But all the action has centered on a little-known transaction type that just happens to be offered by Visa and MasterCard. The late summer’s rash of announcements for ready-to-go, real-time payments without the need for a big new network …

• The rash of hotel breaches continues. Noble House Hotels & Resorts said it confirmed that a payment card system used at its Teton Mountain Lodge & Spa and Hotel Terra may have been breached between Sept. 5 and Sept. 6. The company said there are no indications the breach …

In the age of the payment facilitator, merchant-vetting practices are taking on an even bigger role. As the payment-facilitator model develops and finds favor among a new set of companies offering payments services to merchants, it shares one age-old element with traditional merchant services. That is the need to check …

With a few exceptions, mobile wallets have so far held scant allure for consumers. Why is that, and what could change it? Most mobile-wallet managers don’t like to talk about it, but their products have a consumer problem—in that people who have the necessary smart phones just aren’t all that …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Two hotel and resort chains this week reported apparent data breaches involving payment cards used at their locations. These latest compromises come less than two weeks after compromise occurred between early March and mid-June. Millennium, which has 14 luxury or boutique U.S. properties, isolated and then took …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews HEI Hotels & Resorts disclosed Friday that malware on point-of-sale systems may have captured payment card information at restaurants and other locations within 20 of its properties. At the same time, the payments industry is watching for clues about the extent of a compromise at Oracle Corp.’s …

Implementing so-called chip-and-PIN authentication for U.S. credit cards would cost merchants and card issuers more than $7 billion but prevent only about $850 million in lost-and-stolen card fraud over five years, a new report from Aite Group LLC says. The report, “Chip Cards in the United States: The PIN, PINless, …