Despite scattered successes, too many pitfalls dot the road to widespread merchant acceptance. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies captured the public imagination over the past year, as Bitcoin shattered record after record, PayPal and Square Cash announced they would allow customers to buy cryptocurrency, and major financial institutions such as Bank …

How much attention will the payments industry draw from the regulator and its new director? History would indicate the industry won’t be ignored. PayPal Holdings Inc.’s win earlier this year in its lawsuit against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its prepaid rule may have appeared to push back on …

Individual hackers, organized cyber criminals, and spying nations are all part of a colossal drive to exploit recent developments in artificial intelligence. Why? To create an alternative universe populated by fake characters that are indistinguishable from real human beings with a real name, a real face, and a real bank …

Some 47% of U.S. adults have reported identity theft over the past two years, while the fraud’s toll ballooned to $712.4 billion in 2020, up 42% from 2019, according to a report released in March by Aite Group, a Boston-based research and consulting firm, and sponsored by Giact, an Allen, …

Sometimes you get what you want if you just ask—and if you have the right people asking for you. Just before we went to press with this issue, Visa and Mastercard released the news that they were holding off on planned interchange-rate adjustments for another year, until April 2022. Their …

The drive to build merchant acceptance of cryptocurrency continues to gain momentum with RocketFuel Blockchain Inc.’s announcement on Wednesday that it is rolling out a one-click, blockchain-based payments solution for e-commerce transactions. RocketFuel’s service supports payments or direct bank transfers in 43 cryptocurrencies. The first two merchants to adopt the …

Visa Inc. reported early Monday that after a year of preparation it has completed the first transaction involving direct settlement with a so-called stablecoin, USD Coin. The transaction, which involves a stablecoin that mirrors the U.S. dollar, allowed Crypto.com, a platform for the trading of digital currencies, to send transactions …

Amadis, Advanced Mobile Payment Inc., and Texas Engineering Consulting Systems and Services said they launched the jointly-developed EMVMadeEZ, a pre-certified EMV migration product for automated fuel dispensers. The product enables convenience store operators, small chains, and single gas station owners with an EMV-at-the-pump service.Payments-technology provider AEVI International GmbH said it is …

Veteran payments practitioners will recall that, “in the beginning,” issuers paid interchange to merchants to incent them to accept credit card payments from the incipient Visa and Mastercard networks.  By the inception of electronic draft capture (circa 1980), that acceptance was growing to a critical-mass level nationwide, and by the late …

News late Wednesday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is inquiring into a newly popular alternative for going public comes as payments firms increasingly turn to the method in lieu of a traditional public offering. Reuters reported late Thursday the SEC is contacting Wall Street financial institutions to ask …