In a move that expands its business as a provider of risk-control services for merchants and card issuers, Visa Inc. announced Thursday that it has a deal to acquire e-commerce payment-authentication provider CardinalCommerce Corp. Founded in 1999, Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce’s signature product is Cardinal Secure Authentication, a service that uses …

The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend $27.5 billion on gift cards this holiday season, up 5.8% from $26 billion in 2015. The increase follows the 18% plunge last year from $31.7 billion in 2014, which was the highest gift card spending total in at least seven years on NRF surveys. …

Citing the difficulties that gas stations are having in retrofitting fuel pumps to accept EMV chip cards, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are postponing their Oct. 1, 2017, EMV liability shift for U.S. automated fuel dispensers (AFDs) until Oct. 1, 2020. Visa announced the postponement in a blog posting early Thursday. The …

The ever-expanding Internet of Things could represent a back-to-the-future security nightmare for the payments industry. What’s a network without endpoints? Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. have big networks—about 8 million endpoints in the form of merchant locations that include point-of-sale terminals in the U.S. alone. But the Internet of Things, …

Going too deep into the payments thicket could be a sales killer. Smart agents know when, and how, to explain certain terms. Want a sure way to stunt a sale, perhaps even ensure it can’t be closed? Start talking about payments. Yes, start throwing around the key words and phrases …

The new year will be ringing in with questions about Visa’s plan to improve the data-security work that third parties do on small merchants’ point-of-sale systems. What happens when a payment-security requirement isn’t enforced and is largely ignored by vast numbers of the industry participants it covers? We’re about to …

How some unscrupulous players are bilking unsuspecting merchants by promising fast—but expensive—ways to recover acceptance costs. A surcharge is a fee that is added to a card transaction, either as a set amount or a percentage of the transaction, typically to allow the merchant to recover all or part of …

Consumers are no longer enamored of single-purchase models. By adopting recurring-transaction models, companies can begin to offer a new and improved user experience. The subscription economy, a term coined by Zuora Inc., is growing fast, and businesses are taking note. According to a recent report from Zuora, a cloud-based provider …

The wrangling over debit card transaction routing heated up last month as Visa Inc. disclosed the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the network’s EMV routing practices. And the Federal Reserve earlier in November posted guidance about EMV debit routing that, according to eight retailer trade groups, was issued in response …

Even though independent software vendors (ISVs) have been working with payments processors for years, the developers still represent a major opportunity for acquirers and processors. That’s because 49% of ISVs do not integrate payments functionality into their systems, according to new research from First Annapolis Consulting, an Annapolis, Md.-based payments-advisory …