Consumers are expected to use their smart phones and tablets to do more than check prices this holiday season. More of them expect to make mobile-commerce purchases—forecasted to reach $1.6 billion on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday— finds the Adobe Digital Index, a research service from Adobe …

  PayPal Inc. will use electronic gift card services from InComm Holdings Inc., a move that will enable PayPal to expand the number of retailers’ gift cards that it sells on the PayPal Digital Gifts store and in the eBay marketplace. PayPal, a unit of San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc., …

By Jim Daly Mocapay Inc., one of the nation’s pioneers in mobile payments, hopes to expand its small footprint through a new distribution agreement announced this week with Merchant Link, a gateway and data-security service owned by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s merchant-acquiring unit, Chase Paymentech. Founded in 2007, Denver-based Mocapay …

  Tablet-based point-of-sale company Revel Systems says it has secured $90 million in Series C financing, a windfall it will use to keep up with growth for its iPad-based POS systems, the company announced Tuesday. Private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which has long invested in payments companies, …

With a critical deadline coming up 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 …

By Jim Daly MasterCard Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to buy gateway businesses from TNS Inc. that will expand the global footprint of its DataCash e-commerce subsidiary. Terms of the deal, which is expected to close by year’s end, were not disclosed. The sale includes two units …

By John Stewart Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX) has launched its CurrentC mobile-payment service with “thousands” of consumers in “several American cities,” the program’s chief executive said on Wednesday. The “consumers,” employees of retailers that make up the Needham, Mass.-based MCX consortium, are part of a pilot for the fledgling …

  Money-transfer provider MoneyGram International Inc. has launched MGiAlloy, a technology platform to enable greater use of alternative financial services. MGiAlloy, which can be used on kiosks, online, on mobile device or at points-of-sale, enables consumers to transfer money, pay bills, cash checks, reload prepaid cards and other services. Dallas-based MoneyGram …

The Gimlet Eye The rapid emergence of mobile devices and mobile apps in retail settings has led some observers of the payments business to predict the near-term demise of the humble point-of-sale payments terminal. We demur, for reasons we lay out in our story “POS Terminals Have a Future, And …

  Mobile POS services, integrated software, and migration to the EMV standard are all influencing sales of terminals. Cast aside any preconceptions about the imminent demise of the standalone point-of-sale terminal. That venerable device, which symbolizes payments in the minds of consumers—and recurring revenue for payments professionals—is not going away …