Gideon Samid – Gideon@AGSgo.com       Clients often ask me: “If I have water on my kitchen floor, I call in a plumber who plugs all my leaks and I don’t need to call him back next week. Why do we have to patch and plug virus holes—daily?” …

  By Karen Epper Hoffman   A fixture in online gaming, virtual currencies are moving into other digital markets and may break into the physical world. But will acceptance costs and regulatory concerns stymie their growth?       Virtual currency has long been seen as little more than the …

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 …

Payvment Inc., a San Francisco startup whose shopping-cart software has been enabling transactions for storefronts on Facebook for the past six months, plans to use $1.5 million in new funding to add engineers and expand its network beyond the massive social network. Christian Taylor, the company’s chief executive, tells Digital …

Online PINless debit transactions could get a boost if a package of four new mobile-payments services from Obopay Inc. proves to be a hit. Dubbed Mobile Money for Banks, Obopay’s new white-label service has another interesting twist besides PINless debit in that it will enable consumers to accept payment cards. …

Here's one way credit card issuers could win back some popularity in an increasingly debit card world: make credit cards function like debit cards. That's the essence of a new product from processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS), which last week unveiled its TSYS Hybrid card. The patent-pending product enables …

If consumer confusion is holding back mobile payments, a startup called XipWire Inc. figures it has an answer. The five-person Philadelphia company earlier this month launched a text-based service that lets handset users pay merchants as well as other individuals. But while other more established payments companies have already started …

Mercantile Bank of Michigan has an answer for observers who want to know why financial institutions are starting to show an interest in person-to-person payments. It comes down to competition for deposits, says John Schulte, senior vice president and chief information officer at the bank, which will introduce a commercial …

Canada's Interac Association debit network is teaming with France-based semiconductor manufacturer Inside Contactless in a partnership that will include a test next year that will pair PIN-based debit cards with contactless payments. But to keep transactions moving quickly, cardholders will not need to enter a PIN. The test will be …

PayPal Inc. is planning to launch a flexible-payments application programming interface that will allow merchants and others to build their own payment systems, but the company denies that the Adaptive Payments API is a response to Amazon.com Inc.'s Flexible Payments Service, which has been available as a commercial product for …