Now that merchant acquirers, and, by extension, merchants, are liable for certain kinds of fraud losses if the merchants aren’t prepared for EMV chip cards, acquirers are starting to put in place EMV non-compliance fees to cover their new risk exposure. One of the first to move on this is …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …

  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, …

    As more merchants begin to realize the need to become EMV compliant and purchase EMV-capable devices, they will be searching for the right solution for their business. Imagine being one of the few VARs able to provide an EMV-compatible solution and the opportunities it could present. In this …

After alerting the investment community in July that it intended to file for an initial public offering of stock, merchant processor Square Inc. on Wednesday finally went public with its plans. San Francisco-based Square, which first made a name for itself by providing mobile-payment services to tiny businesses and individual …

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 …

  Consumer confusion, lack of standards for offers, and splintered merchant acceptance continue to impede mobile-wallet adoption among consumers, but they are not expected to thwart the long-term prospects for the payments model, suggested panelists on Wednesday at the NFC Solutions Summit in Phoenix. Near-field communication (NFC) technology not only can …

While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco shows cash still represents 40% of retail payments volume. The study found cash is the lowest-total-cost payment medium for a merchant to accept, simply because the fixed cost is pretty much a requirement for a retail store and the variable …

The EMV era in the U.S. officially started Oct. 1, and for the most part this is shaping up to be an underwhelming launch for chip cards. It’s morning in America for payment cards, the accession of the EMV chip card as the successor to the half-century-old magnetic-stripe card. The …