Merchant cash advances for online retailers suddenly are coming into vogue with the entry of PayPal Inc. into the market. PayPal recently disclosed that it plans to test in its home country a cash-advance program similar to one it has tested in the United Kingdom. Finance companies and merchant …

  Digital currency Bitcoin is making strides in its campaign to be viewed as a legitimate alternative to traditional payment methods. A major Bitcoin processor—Atlanta-based BitPay Inc.—yesterday announced it had processed more than $5.2 million in Bitcoin transactions for its e-commerce merchants during March. And earlier in the week, the …

As they began their work, some Federal Reserve Board governors expressed uneasiness with the task Congress assigned them in 2010 through the Dodd-Frank Act: implement the debit card regulations called for in the sweeping law’s Durbin Amendment. In March, however, the Fed expressed enough satisfaction with its handiwork to declare …

Karen Epper Hoffman It’s been 18 months since the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect. Who is benefitting the most from the first government intervention into card-acceptance pricing? A year-and-a-half after the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect, the radical legislation that created the cap remains …

Jim Daly Apple has rolled out its Passbook mobile app for storing and redeeming electronic coupons, boarding passes, and other digital content. Can full-blown payments be far behind? No company is the subject of more speculation than the notoriously secretive Apple Inc. Lately, frenzied tongues have been wagging about what …

Elizabeth Whalen Tech companies and processors are transforming tablet computers, notably Apple’s iPad, into mobile electronic cash registers of the future that do a whole lot more than simply payments. Four years ago—before the introduction of the iPad—Jason Richelson was trying to find a better point-of-sale system for his three-location …

Linda Punch Proponents say EMV chip cards with dynamic authentication could take a real bite out of card fraud. But what does this new technology mean for PINs? As the card industry rolls out so-called EMV contact and contactless chip cards in the U.S., the technology known as dynamic data …

Jim Daly Could Congress be convinced to impose Durbin-style price caps on credit card interchange, the way it did with debit cards? Many regard such a scenario as a near impossibility, but hope springs eternal. Unless they’re public-sector contractors, retailers and other business people usually say they want government out …

  Great news for mobile payments: the Federal Reserve says the percentage of consumers using a smart phone to make a purchase at the point of sale grew nearly threefold last year. Not-so-great news: don’t rely on that figure, because it’s too small to be statistically significant. Those and other …

  Like metastatic cancer, the cyberattacks originating from ordinary hackers all the way up to national governments seem to be getting worse by the day, according to security experts who spoke Wednesday to a conference of e-commerce executives. Case in point: last week, citizens of South Korea couldn’t use banks …