After 13 years, PayPal is free of eBay and once again an independent company. It dominates online and mobile commerce, but has stumbled at the point of sale. What will it do now that it calls all the shots? Like a young adult getting his first apartment and starting a …

PayPal Inc. may soon be joined by leading payment card processor First Data Corp. and upstart merchant processor Square Inc. as the newest members of the club of publicly traded payments companies. In a long-anticipated move, First Data filed a registration statement July 20 for an IPO. The filing gave …

By John Stewart When First Data Corp. last month formally let the world know it intends to make an initial public offering of stock, the massive processor said it plans to use the IPO’s proceeds to reduce its big debt load. Some experts said this could free up capital so …

Retail ATM network operator Cardtronics Inc. says it has been preparing for the possible loss of its biggest merchant, convenience-store giant 7-Eleven Inc., for three years and will stick to its established growth plan to fill the impending hole now that that possibility has become a reality. Houston-based Cardtronics has …

By John Stewart and Jim Daly With products like its MasterPass digital wallet, MasterCard Inc. has stepped up its efforts to stake a claim in the emerging market for digital payments. But the company is loath to commit itself too soon to any particular technology, according to the card network’s …

First Data Corp. filed a registration statement Monday for an initial public stock offering, a long-anticipated move that the highly leveraged payment processor expects will help reduce its debt. The statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission does not say how many shares First Data plans to issue or …

By Jim Daly Next week’s planned split of PayPal from parent company eBay Inc. has payments investors anticipating that plenty of locked-up value and growth opportunities will be released for the online payments leader. PayPal began trading on a so-called “when-issued” basis Monday on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the …

Four computers containing Social Security and bank-account numbers for an estimated 2,200 individuals have been stolen from a California office of merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc.’s payroll-processing division, Heartland reported Monday. Also on Monday the PCI Security Standards Council updated its rules governing payment card software. And in other …

Prepaid card issuer and services provider Green Dot Corp. lost considerable reload volume and revenues in the first quarter because of the discontinuance of its popular MoneyPak product, but the company late Thursday said its core businesses demonstrated good organic growth and recent acquisitions gave a big boost to the …

The threat of assuming fraud losses carries some weight with  merchants, but not as much as some might think.  Converting many of these merchants to EMV will be a struggle.   Independent sales organizations, acquirers, and processors of all sizes are about to embark on a massive education campaign designed …