The Merchant Financial Cyber Partnership, a unique coalition of eight financial-services trade associations and 11 merchant groups, wants Congress to make it easier for retailers and financial institutions to share information with each other related to data breaches. Merchants and financial-services companies often are bitter foes when it comes …

While governments and established payments networks around the world reckon with Bitcoin, the upstart digital currency has itself had to reckon this year with volatility that has seen its price plunge about 50% since its $700-plus January high. But in other respects, Bitcoin is riding high. One of the latest …

  Braintree, the PayPal Inc.-owned online processor, says it has expanded the availability of its One Touch mobile-payments service into international markets. Announced in September for U.S. merchants, One Touch enables consumers to make payments without typing their user names and passwords for each transaction. Braintree says this helps reduce …

  Consumers wielding smart phones and tablets put their PayPal accounts to work over the just-passed holiday-shopping weekend. PayPal, a unit of eBay Inc. until its anticipated spinoff in 2015, says its global mobile-payments volume increased 62% on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, over the same day in 2013. …

What’s that big, juicy new target out there for cyber-hackers? Apple Pay, of course. And don’t forget ATMs, either, since many deployers have yet to upgrade machines running old, increasingly vulnerable versions of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP operating system. Apple Pay and ATMs are included on Woburn, Mass.-based data-security services …

Once perceived as a payment method for drug dealers and shady merchants craving anonymity, the Bitcoin virtual currency is now accepted at approximately 75,000 merchants worldwide, and their numbers are growing fast, according to a new report by First Annapolis Consulting Inc. Even so, it will be a while before …

Well into the annual Cyber Monday shopping frenzy, online sales are up nearly 9% compared to last year, while mobile devices are driving more traffic and sales, continuing a trend established on Thanksgiving and on Black Friday. That’s according to IBM Corp.’s Digital Analytics service, which is reporting periodically on …

The Gimlet EyeWhen Apple Inc. unveiled its Apple Pay mobile-payments service in September, and again when the service went live in October, the hype surrounding the new product—coupled with its fast uptake—put us in mind of another highly anticipated payments launch that took place almost 25 years ago. It, too, …

With a critical deadline arriving in less than a year, it has become a common observation about the U.S. conversion to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard that transaction fraud prevented by EMV will simply move into e-commerce channels. Now, a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research argues e-commerce …

AcquiringBy Jim DalyVolumes have been written about how Apple Pay benefits, or doesn’t benefit, consumers, merchants, card issuers, and even payment networks. But what about merchant acquirers? Train a cold eye on the new Apple Pay mobile-payment service for Apple Inc.’s recently introduced iPhone 6 models and the upcoming Apple …