Now that the Federal Reserve has released its plan for faster payments in the United States, observers are applauding the effort while expressing some impatience with what they see as the central bank’s overly deliberate approach. “The Fed is indeed headed in the right direction, but it is a slow …

In a blueprint released Monday for a faster and more secure U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve called for industry task forces to form early this year and for a “framework” to emerge by 2016 to set rules for near real-time payments. The banking regulator also set out five broad, …

Americans love to shop. Whether online, in a small mom-and-pop business, or at a big-box retailer, shoppers turned out in droves this past holiday season. From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday for example, online sales were up 12.6%–a record week–according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. For the holiday season overall, …

The United States with its several thousand credit and debit card issuers and more than a dozen payment networks presents a stiff challenge to the card industry as it tries to convert from magnetic-stripe stripe cards to Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards, two industry veterans told a group of independent sales …

CKE Restaurants Inc., parent of the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. fast-food chains, and TGI Fridays Inc. are using Microsoft Corp. technology to speed up the ordering and purchase process in their restaurants, the Redmond, Wash.-based computing giant announced on Monday. Carrollton, Texas-based TGI Fridays is putting 8-inch tablets into the …

Softcard, the mobile-payments venture of Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA, has laid of 60 employees in a restructuring, according to media reports. The layoffs raise questions about the future of Softcard, formerly known as Isis, which has had trouble gaining consumer and merchant acceptance for its near-field communication-based …

Card-not-present fraud is the bane of any merchant that operates an e-commerce site, and EMVCo, a standards body for the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) specification, hopes its newly assumed oversight of the 3D Secure authentication standard can help them. Operated as Visa Inc.’s Verified by Visa and MasterCard Inc.’s SecureCode, 3D Secure …

By Digital Transactions News Staff Bolstered by solid growth in the U.S. and Asia, merchant processor Global Payments Inc. on Thursday reported total revenues of $697.3 million for its second quarter of fiscal 2015 ended Nov. 30, up 10% from $634.1 million a year earlier. Second-quarter net income increased only …

Traffic on the automated clearing house network continues to climb at a steady clip as financial institutions and other users of the system mull over a proposal to speed up payments from next-day to same-day settlement. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, overall volume on the ACH grew 4.15% year …

According to the 2014 World Retail Banking Report from Capgemini and Efma, less than 40% (a decrease from 41.6% in 2013 to 39.5% in 2014) of customers globally reported having positive customer experiences with their bank. The main reason for this dissatisfaction is the bank’s failure to develop a comprehensive …