Add TransFirst Holdings Inc. to the growing roster of payments companies turning to the publicly traded stock markets to raise cash. The big merchant acquirer late Friday announced it filed an S-1 registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering of stock. The filing, …

  With a mission to offer as many free, or cheap, money-exchange services as possible, Uphold, a virtual funds and commodity platform, on Wednesday launched the first of a four-phase effort to expand its reach among consumers, merchants, charitable organizations and software developers. Uphold, the new name of Bitreserve, an …

Within a week, four more major retailers—ExxonMobil, Sears, Shell Oil, and WalMart—will join the CurrentC pilot that started last month in Columbus, Ohio. That’s according to Brian V. Mooney, a long-time processing executive who took over in April as interim chief executive of the mobile wallet’s sponsor organization, Merchant Customer …

By John Stewart The rise of tokenization into a major payments business helps enable enterprises like Apple Pay and Android Pay but could also pose a threat to the financial institutions that have historically issued the majority of the cards consumers use most often. That threat lies in the fact …

The American Bankers Association seems to have persuaded the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do something the Bureau rarely ever does, at least in public: change its mind. The FBI’s original position was the consumers should enter a personal identification number whenever possible when using their new EMV chip cards. …

A public service announcement the FBI posted Thursday warning consumers that the new EMV chip cards “are vulnerable to exploitation by fraudsters” and urging them to enter a PIN instead of a signature during EMV credit card transactions was removed Friday, apparently at the behest of the leading banker trade …

Lately, the payments industry has been much taken with the so-called Millennial generation and how to appeal to it. Research released Wednesday indicates a key to this question is to take advantage of the one smart-phone activity the 18-to-34 age group has made famous: the selfie. The research, conducted by …

By John Stewart Just within the past year or so, tokenization has assumed a central role in digital payments, and in that business three major card networks are the dominant—indeed, only—players performing a crucial function known as the token service provider. But this new form of payment processing is moving …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Ingenico Group has teamed up with Bitcoin merchant acquirer BitPay Inc. to retrofit a traditional POS terminal for Bitcoin acceptance in stores. And the U.S. Marshals Service is planning to auction off the last of the Bitcoin that the FBI seized in 2013 when it busted Ross …

By Jim Daly They’re few and far between, but another U.S. issuer, regional banking company First Niagara Financial Group Inc., has committed itself to issuing EMV credit cards of the chip-and-PIN variety. Buffalo, N.Y.-based First Niagara announced just before the U.S. EMV liability shift took effect that it will convert …