Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …

Money transfers took a step toward app-based processing on Monday with news that BBVA is launching a service that will let persons in the United States use their smart phones to send money to recipients in Mexico. Later, the service will expand to the Caribbean and the rest of Latin …

Financial institutions wearied of seeing nonbanks scoop up more and more of the digital person-to-person payments business, so they’ve begun offering the service themselves. But a report released Wednesday indicates those efforts aren’t panning out all that well, at least for mid-sized and smaller institutions. “Lots of hype and no …

There are still many unknowns, but siding and the roof are on order for the frame of the Federal Reserve’s faster-payments project. That’s the message conveyed Tuesday by Fed officials and payments-industry executives who participated in a years-long effort to speed up U.S. electronic payments as well as make them …

The Federal Reserve issued a report on Wednesday that indicates the nation’s central bank could play a much more active role in faster payments than many have expected, up to and including providing alternative processing services. Up to now, the Fed has limited its role to sponsoring working groups that …

Financial-services processor Fiserv Inc. announced it has acquired real-time payments provider Dovetail Group Ltd. Terms were not announced. Payments provider Spectrum Payments said it joined the National Rural Health Association as a pipeline partner, enabling it to offer merchant services to association members. Blockchain technology firm BTCS Inc. said it has signed a non-binding letter of intent …

A number of daunting challenges face the U.S. payments industry as it sets out to make speedier transactions available everywhere in the country within three years, according to a report released this week by Aite Group, a Boston-based consulting firm. Among these challenges are the absence of an industrywide mandate …

The international financial-messaging service SWIFT is set to offer a gateway for U.S. financial institutions to link to a real-time payments facility offered by The Clearing House, a payments company owned by major U.S. banks. Team One Credit Union, a Michigan financial institution, has added Bukoski Agency, a fuel retailer, to its …

As merchants and payments processors wrestle with linking e-commerce transaction data with data generated from in-store payments, vendors are starting to offer products to ease that connection. An early player is Creditcall Ltd., which on Monday introduced software that allows processors to combine data streams from a merchant’s online and …

Now that the Federal Reserve-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force has issued its final report calling for speedier payments everywhere in the United States by 2020, the really hard work can now begin, say some observers. Payments cleared and settled in near real time has long been a goal of many …