By Nate Stewart. Zing Apple Inc. has finally entered the mobile-payments game, and yes, it’s a big deal. The reaction, though, has been veering toward the negative aspects of Apple’s move and how it could hurt different industry players. The reality is quite the opposite. Apple has just become the …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s announcement this week that it will be offering checking accounts to consumers through Green Dot Corp.’s GoBank mobile-banking services reopened old fissures between banks and non-banking companies over offering financial services to consumers, fissures that radiate out to the topic of payments security. At the Federal Reserve …

Frustration with typing in a 16-digit payment card number on a smart-phone screen leads to a lot of lost sales for e-commerce merchants. It’s a problem that two payments companies, offering different products, say they can help with. Making its U.S. debut first is PayItSimple USA Inc., an installment-payment service. …

Tokens, that is, tokens for securing electronic payments, almost became a household word two weeks ago when Apple Inc. introduced Apple Pay, a mobile-payments service that will rely heavily on tokens when it launches next month. The concept of tokenization, however, has been around for quite some time in the …

More than a fifth of small and mid-sized businesses use mobile devices to accept payments, almost twice the rate of mobile acceptance two years ago, but all too few of those businesses are concerned about payment security, according to new findings from ControlScan Inc. According to the survey of 6,186 …

Bitcoin Shop Inc. runs an e-commerce marketplace offering about 140,000 products, which on the face of it isn’t all that remarkable. What sets the 1-year-old site apart, though, is that it accepts only digital currency. No cards or bank-account transfers, please, just Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin. But Arlington, Va.-based Bitcoin …

Mobile-payments providers have looked to offers and rewards as a means of engaging with consumers and merchants and boosting payments activity. Indeed, most mobile strategists value the technology’s ability to deliver rewards at the moment consumers are in the store, if not necessarily in front of the relevant merchandise. But …

In case you spent the entire Labor Day long weekend in a fishing boat on a remote lake, you could barely miss the stories moving over the business wires in recent days about Apple Inc. and electronic payments. In sum, the iconic computer maker and iTunes and App Store provider …

Ever since the carrier-billing model for mobile payments found a foothold in the digital-goods market several years ago, processors have tested various tactics to broaden the range of goods the model could be applied to. The latest example is San Francisco-based Boku Inc. and its announcement Thursday that it will …

Citigroup Inc. claims to have become the first global bank to introduce its own branded wallet in the U.S. The question now is how much Citi’s millions of payment card holders will care as digital-wallet services proliferate. The new Citi Wallet announced Monday is based on MasterCard Inc.’s MasterPass platform, …