The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday issued nine guidelines summarizing its vision for faster payments as banks, payment processors, tech companies, and other government regulators continue work on proposals for improving U.S. payments. “Companies developing new financial technologies should be building systems from the outset with consumer protections …

You may have heard the term, “friendly fraud.” It’s no surprise, then, that there’s nothing friendly about it. And it’s quickly becoming a major problem for merchants across the globe. Friendly fraud, also called friendly-fraud chargebacks or cyber-shoplifting, occurs when a customer makes a purchase online and then files a …

Some of the nation’s major PIN-debit networks over the past couple of years have quietly instituted so-called participation fees that are assessed for each merchant location in the network. The fees’ progenitor, says a veteran market observer, is Visa Inc.’s Fixed Acquirer Network Fee (FANF), which Visa instituted in 2012. …

  Mobile POS devices may not displace entirely the traditional countertop POS terminal, but they could come close. It emerged six years ago among the smallest of merchants and had only one function: accepting credit and debit card transactions. But now the mobile point-of-sale device and its attendant software have …

Mobile peer-to-peer transfer has led to ubiquitous, real-time payment in a social context. But can anyone make any money in this business? Nobody can say for sure when the first electronic person-to-person payment took place, but payments historians are pretty sure they can pinpoint the first official P2P transfer using …

It’s a huge decision for any business, but it can be especially crucial for a small one, says Dan Leberman. Here are some important considerations to make the job a little easier. Even if you have coding experience, tackling a heavy-lifting payments integration carries substantial opportunity cost. And if you …

Despite its strengths, online wire-transfer provider Xoom Inc. faces increasingly tough competition from newer market entrants such as PayPal Inc., which is taking its popular Venmo person-to-person payments service abroad, and from established agent-based providers such as The Western Union Co. and MoneyGram International Inc., which are increasing their online …

America’s tardiness in adopting EMV chip card technology has long been known to contribute to rising rates of fraud here, but now it appears the country’s plans to convert to EMV are, ironically, causing pain overseas. Fraudulent cross-border transactions on debit cards issued in the United Kingdom increased 25% in …

With $12 million in new funding, PayRange Inc. wants to place more of its Bluetooth-equipped dongles inside vending machines to enable more consumers to make contactless, and cashless, payments. The funding, announced Thursday by Portland, Ore.-based PayRange, will be used to expand its staff and increase the number of PayRange-equipped …

While social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest develop so-called buy buttons for the ads they sell, third-party developers are looking at extending the same technology across not only social networks but apps, mobile sites, and even emails. One of the most aggressive of these developers, Santa Clara, Calif.-based XpressBuy …