Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

Historically, the payments industry has ignored the fact that not everyone who shops online has a credit or debit card. With a handful of startups providing cash processing for online transactions, that’s no longer the case. By Karen Epper Hoffman No matter how much credit and debit cards have come …

Though aimed mainly at debit cards, the Durbin Amendment corrals prepaid cards in a number of ways, as well. Will the restrictions choke off growth in this thriving business? By Linda Punch When the Durbin Amend­ment passed, major financial institutions issuing prepaid cards thought they had dodged the proverbial bullet. …

Virtual Currencies: Bust-Out Ahead? Witness the recent travails of the euro if you want proof of how hard it is for any new currency, even a physical currency backed by multiple governments, to attain and retain widespread usage and acceptance. The obstacles blocking the new breed of electronic currencies from …

The Internet, especially through online gaming and social networks, has spawned a number of new electronic currencies. Are any of these ready to make the leap into general usage, the way dollars and pounds and euros and yen are today? That was the fascinating question raised this week at a …

  By Jane Adler   The payments industry has made great strides in the area of security, but malicious computer code is still an ever-evolving threat to processors and merchants.       For a restaurant manager, Gary Sipp knows a whole lot about malicious computer software, usually referred to …

  Visa Gives a Push to Prepaid Cards   If Visa Inc. could be personified as an illustrious 19th Century editor, he might be saying, “Go prepaid, young man.”   The No. 1 payment card network’s interchange schedule effective Oct. 1, the day new federal debit card interchange price controls …

  By Jane Adler   Rightly or wrongly, lots of investors are mesmerized by the high-profile startup Square. But it’s not the only newbie transforming the payments industry as venture-capital firms scramble to find the next big idea.       Some startup companies get all the attention.   The …

  By Peter Lucas   Spam e-mail may be a constant irritant to consumers, but it’s big business for merchant acquirers willing to settle transactions resulting from those unsolicited ads. Can anything be done to stop it?       Every day some unsuspecting consumer receives an unsolicited e-mail from …

  The good news: merchants’ total losses from fraudulent transactions are down. The bad news: losses are likely to rise. More bad news: fraudsters are taking a liking to alternative and mobile payments. Those are some of the key findings from the third annual “LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud” study …