With Target Corp. reportedly planning its own mobile wallet, the nation’s fourth-largest retailer may some time next year join the largest, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in launching a proprietary wallet app. That could not only add to the fragmentation of the nascent digital-wallet market, it could also indicate weakening attachment to …

By John Stewart Acting in response to comment from the industry, the PCI Security Standards Council has extended a key security deadline for payments processors, merchants, and banks by fully two years. These players now have until June 30, 2018, to stop using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and instead …

Newly launched Tender Armor hopes its CvvPlus product can help issuers, merchants, and consumers combat the risk from fraudulent card-not-present transactions, the company announced Wednesday. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company says CvvPlus can help stem online fraud by providing a daily card verification code that is not printed on a …

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Financial Services Committee on Tuesday afternoon was scheduled to consider a data-security bill that is drawing fire from merchant trade groups and consumer advocates, but which has the support of the American Bankers Association. H.R. 2205, the Data Security Act of 2015, was introduced last …

Point-of-sale terminals and fuel pumps as lottery-ticket dispensers? That’s a question some states continue to mull, though Minnesota tried it and didn’t like it. The latest state trying to juice lottery sales by making card payments easier is Florida. Bills introduced last month in the state House and Senate would allow …

By John Stewart It operates so much in the background that many payments professionals may not have noticed, but the automated clearing house network is on a hot streak. The 41-year-old system notched a 5.9% year-over-year increase in transactions in the quarter ended Sept. 30, reaching a total of 4.83 …

By John Stewart Ever since the launch of Apple Pay more than a year ago, mobile wallets have followed a pattern of recruiting financial institutions to enable their network-branded credit and debit cards to work in the wallet apps. But retailers are getting in on this action, as well, with …

Holiday shoppers took advantage of online deals on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, ringing up $2.8 billion in sales for retailers, according to research firm comScore Inc. Online sales on Thanksgiving topped $1.1 billion, a 9% increase from $1 billion in 2014. Black Friday sales of $1.7 …

New findings about the public’s attitudes toward EMV chip cards and their disruptive potential show consumers appreciate the improved security over magnetic-stripe card payments. Still, many consumers are bothered by the new transaction processes, enough so that some will avoid stores where they know they have to insert a chip …

By John Stewart Last month, the spotlight shone on Merchant Customer Exchange LLC when JPMorgan Chase & Co. officially unveiled its Chase Pay wallet, set to launch next year, and said it will be included in MCX’s merchant-controlled CurrentC application. But, as big as that deal is for MCX, the …