By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Gift card marketers have dominated the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions in recent years, but now a card is coming to thousands of those checkout-lane racks that will let budding investors buy or give away shares of stock in a favorite company.

• Hotel operator Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants said its point-of-sale system at several of its properties was breached earlier this year, from Feb. 16 through July 7. Kimpton began its investigation after receiving a report on July 15 of unauthorized charges after consumers used their cards at the restaurant in …

How EMV is fueling a new merchant-network fight over which electronic highways debit card transactions will travel. War has broken out again between big retailers and the bank card networks. Earlier courtroom fights involved everything from honor-all-cards rules to interchange to merchants’ attempts to steer customers away from high-cost credit …

The question is, how to replace it with something more secure? One promising avenue lies in a standard developed by tech companies that belong to the FIDO Alliance. Since the birth of the personal computer, consumers have held tight to the belief that user names and passwords are secure. Those …

With a few exceptions, mobile wallets have so far held scant allure for consumers. Why is that, and what could change it? Most mobile-wallet managers don’t like to talk about it, but their products have a consumer problem—in that people who have the necessary smart phones just aren’t all that …

The fraud bug struck debit card issuers last year, and the illness spared neither signature nor PIN-based varieties of debit. Researchers identified a big increase in skimming as part, but only one part, of the cause. According to the 2016 Debit Issuer Study commissioned by Discover Financial Services’ Pulse electronic …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews For drivers passing through the Chicago area, there’s now an app that will handle payment on the 292-mile-long ribbon of toll roads snaking through 12 counties in Northern Illinois. FastToll, from a Las Vegas-based developer called Pragmistic LLC, arrives just ahead of the Labor Day weekend, …

• Mobile-ticketing platform Atom Tickets announced its app now works with 200 more theaters in 40 new markets across the country, including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Ore., Denver, and Sacramento. Partners include AMC Theaters, Regal Cinemas, and Studio Movie Grill. • In related news, mobile-ticketing specialist ExtremeTix Inc. introduced a …

• Shift4 Corp. announced it is among the first payment gateways to introduce a software update to support the various quick-chip solutions from the major payment brands for faster EMV chip card transactions. • Uber and Visa Inc. launched Uber Local Offers, a program that enables Uber riders to earn …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Mobile wallets eventually will get the contactless terminals and other infrastructure they need to attract consumers, according to an executive with Alphabet Inc.’s Android Pay. Their ultimate success, however, will depend on the value they offer merchants and consumers. “It’s still all about value creation,” Jack Connors, …