For years, the growth of electronic payments has been fueled by the conversion of check writers into card users at the point of sale, but now those days may be coming to an end. Research, as well as the experience of one major retail chain, indicates the check writers who …

EBay Inc.’s top brass made it clear on Wednesday that mobile technology is dominating strategic thinking at PayPal Inc., even though it does not yet account for a significant share of transaction volume for the eBay unit. Addressing stock analysts during eBay’s quarterly earnings call, eBay chief executive John Donahoe …

British mobile-banking and payments technology provider Monitise plc announced a $173 million deal Monday to buy San Rafael, Calif.-based Clairmail Inc. that will give Monitise a much bigger U.S. presence in mobile financial services and further consolidate a market nurtured by startups but feeling the increasing presence of international card …

New data from automated clearing house governing body NACHA reaffirm the continuing gains of electronic bill payment and the long-term decline in consumer check writing to pay bills. NACHA’s report for 2011’s fourth quarter says that transactions under the so-called WEB standard entry class code for Internet bill-payment debits grew …

Experts may well have proclaimed 2012 to be the Year of Mobile Payments, what with digital wallets and other product introductions proliferating seemingly by the day, but at least some researchers are starting to ask a key question: Do consumers really want mobile payments? According to preliminary data, the answer …

Dissatisfied with the current crop of mobile-payments systems from tech companies, cell-phone providers, card networks and banks, a group of U.S. retailers is embarking on its own plan to bring smart-phone payments to their customers. The merchants stress that their venture will not necessarily be based on near-field communication (NFC), …

The question posed in our headline this month is one we used to lead off our cover story last October, “Merchants Zero in on Payments.” At the time, merchants were fresh off a signal victory over the banks and the networks in a bruising Congressional battle over debit card interchange, …

Building on its $465 million acquisition in September of person-to-person payments service CashEdge Inc., bank processor Fiserv Inc. on Wednesday announced it will combine CashEdge’s Popmoney with Fiserv’s  ZashPay P2P payment networks under the Popmoney name. The combined network, which also will be integrated into Fiserv’s CheckFree RXP payment suite, …

The Home Depot Inc. on Tuesday started rolling out a point-of-sale payment system that will let customers pay with their PayPal accounts at all of the home-improvement retailer’s almost 2,000 U.S. stores. The rollout comes just seven weeks after the two companies unveiled a five-store pilot in the San Francisco …

The nation’s largest transit operators are moving toward so-called open-fare payment systems that will enable riders to pay fares with just a tap of a contactless bank card at a subway turnstile or a terminal on a bus. Replacement of old fare systems, however, is not going at nearly the …