Shelley Plomske Mobile payments and social marketing are creating many new opportunities for small and mid-sized businesses. Here are some key points for merchants as these new technologies and techniques ramp up.This year will be unlike anything ever witnessed in the payments industry. Driven by the global economic crisis, the …

The move will allow Chirpify members to pay merchants and each other on the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram social networks with American Express, Discover, MasterCard, and Visa cards or with ACH transfers. It also propels the fledgling Portland, Ore.-based company further into the fast-growing world of social commerce, where companies …

  n The purpose of the new “My MBFS” app is to increase customer convenience and continue Mercedes-Benz’s leadership in applying mobile-commerce technology to automobiles, Matt Darrah, manager of B2C digital marketing at Mercedes-Benz n “At Mercedes-Benz Financial Services, we have had this mobile journey, we saw mobile coming in …

Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

Often regarded as operating in a gray area, merchant aggregators let small businesses piggyback on their merchant accounts. But aggregators are moving to the forefront of payments innovation and winning new supporters. By Peter Lucas Complex, confounding, risky, upstart. These are some of the adjectives used to describe merchant aggregators …

  Amazon.com Inc. on Tuesday said it will jump into the digital-currency market with Amazon Coins, a payment product it will roll out in May on for its popular tablet, the Kindle Fire. Users of the device will be able to redeem the new currency on the Amazon Appstore, which …

The gift card, the bedrock of the prepaid card world, is increasingly taking on a digital form, cutting costs for merchants and adding to convenience for mobile-phone-wielding customers. But hold the obituaries for plastic. By Lauri Giesen One of the fastest-growing payment cards isn’t really a plastic card at all. …

  Intuit Inc. on Monday acquired the assets of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Payvment Inc., a 3-year-old vendor of shopping-cart and payment tools for merchants operating on social networks. Terms of the deal, which capped a series of developments that for some observers cast doubt on the market for so-called social …

Elizabeth Whalen The long-awaited test of the telco-backed Isis mobile wallet is under way in Salt Lake City and Austin. What are merchants experiencing? Many in the payments industry believe in the bright future of mobile payments and the potential benefits to consumers and merchants. But after the much-anticipated launch …

Jane Adler Facing pricing pressures from new competitors in their traditional business, the wire-transfer companies are seeking new growth opportunities. New technology is highly disruptive to established markets, and the payments business is no exception. Consider recent developments in the traditional wire-transfer business. As technology and consumer demand change the …