While social media sites are wildly popular with consumers, it turns out those same users give the sites low scores for satisfaction, ranking the category above only airlines and cable and satellite TV providers, according to a report released on Tuesday. Still, that dissatisfaction is unlikely to affect payments processors …

Not always the best of friends, the National Retail Federation and Visa Inc. saw fit on Wednesday to jointly announce that Visa had clarified its card-number storage rules to affirm that merchants may present a truncated or disguised number on a transaction receipt for dispute resolution in place of a …

Driven by growth in government programs, corporate payroll cards, and health care, the network-branded prepaid card sector can expect its U.S. load volume to nearly quadruple from an estimated $120.2 billion last year to more than $440 billion in 2017, according to research commissioned by MasterCard Inc. The study, by …

Most of the public attention on online fraud centers on traditional merchants seeking to identify fraudulent orders, detect and prevent data breaches, and the like. But fraud also is a major concern for the online-game publishers and social networks that operate exclusively in the virtual world. Because of the unique …

As the young market for mobile payments on smart phones takes shape, industry players are scrambling to pair up with world-famous partners with massive numbers of consumer and business customers. Point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc., for example, is selling hardware for its PAYware Mobile application in Apple Inc.’s retail …

Although many U.S. merchants and processors have met Visa Inc.’s July 1 deadline for replacing unapproved point-of-sale software applications with ones that meet requirements of the Payment Application data-security standard, or PA-DSS, many non-compliant card-processing applications remain in the marketplace, Visa says. While Visa would not release numbers on compliance, …

The rich in merchant-acquiring market share got richer last year, but nearly everyone got a little poorer when same-store sales are the measure, according to the latest annual study of the acquiring industry by Mercator Advisory Group Inc. The top five acquirers processed 74% of U.S. general-purpose payment card charge …

Already claiming to be the leader in mobile payments, PayPal Inc. on Thursday announced it had optimized its Express Checkout service for mobile devices. The new mobile service caps a busy week for PayPal that included the disclosure that alternative-payment provider Bling Nation Ltd. is developing a PayPal application. PayPal …

Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has installed its new end-to-end encryption terminals at more than 1,020 merchants since commercially launching the technology on May 24, the company reports. Heartland also will be rolling out a small USB card reader, or “wedge,” later this month, says Steve Elefant, chief information …

As the payments industry waits for the commercial rollout of near-field communication technology, startups are jumping into mobile payments to fill the void. One of the latest attempts to bridge the gap between physical stores and mobile devices is FaceCash, which launched last month and allows consumers to pay merchants …