With the National Retail Federation’s annual trade show kicking off Monday in New York City, a number of payments companies tried to get a head start on the show by releasing news over the weekend. Much of it concerns developments for the physical point of sale. Here’s a wrap-up of …

Sales agents at independent sales organizations and software vendors have a new mobile point-of-sale service to sell merchants. MyOmny, which is available for smart phones and tablets using iOS and Android operating systems, has launched. Developed by Dallas-based Avalon Solutions Group, myOmny is an app that merchants download to their …

If history is any guide, card-not-present fraud will spike now that EMV has officially arrived in the United States. Can a growing array of fraud-prevention technologies stem the tide? When it comes to plying their deceptive trade, fraudsters exploit the weakest link in the security chain. With the EMV chip …

As the EMV reality squeezes card fraudsters out of the card-present business, they are all crowding into the online racket. U.S. retailers should be ready. With retailers seeking advice about this, the first question I ask usually raises eyebrows. I don’t ask about protocols or gadgets. I ask to check …

As 2016 beckons, multiple challenges and opportunities await the payments industry and the Electronic Transactions Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group that represents the merchant-acquiring and -processing industry. Incoming ETA board president Greg Cohen says the association, and the payments industry it represents, are in the midst of a transformation …

Clear away the coin part, and what Bitcoin invented may very well be a better infrastructure for payments: the blockchain. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that logs and confirms transactions based on user consensus. To paraphrase Sarah Martin of the Digital Currency Council, blockchain is a distributed database and …

The payment card world is bracing for a spike in card-not-present fraud now that the U.S. is an EMV country. What’s to be done? The U.S. became an “official” EMV country Oct. 1 by virtue of its point-of-sale liability shift. As credit and debit cards with EMV chips and payment …

Offering value-added services and focusing on the right merchant categories can boost profits and take the sting out of portfolio attrition. Talk of margin compression is nothing new for merchant acquirers. The ongoing race for merchants between acquirers, independent sales organizations, and merchant aggregators has led many players into a …

With the Oct. 1 liability-shift milestone passed, payments companies are reviewing progress so far and introducing new products to take advantage of the migration to EMV chip card payments. First up is MasterCard Inc., which says that “tens of millions” of chip-enabled transactions are being made in the United States. …

You may or may not buy into Bitcoin, but you’re going to love the blockchain. Or so say those who are adopting Bitcoin’s ledger technology for everything from stock exchanges to ticket sales. When the speculative bubble that had driven the price of a single Bitcoin to four-figure heights burst …