Merchant processor iPayment Inc. has agreed to acquire Leaders Merchant Services, an independent sales organization that has worked with iPayment since 2004. Terms were not disclosed. Electronics maker SparkFun Electronics developed an app for Android devices that can detect the likely presence of a credit card skimmer commonly found on …

This malware is a nuisance to many, but could mean big trouble for payments companies. Criminals, much like legitimate businesses, know that the real money is in volume. They would rather have their malicious software on millions of computers than on just a few thousand. The wider the net, the …

Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …

Marking Apple Pay’s third anniversary, an Apple Inc. executive Sunday night outlined an ambition to make the wallet usable in a wide range of what the company calls “everyday” events in people’s lives. “This [Apple Pay] is the future of everyday spend,” declared Jennifer Bailey, vice president for Internet services …

In the age of electronic payments, cash is getting more and more expensive—even when accessed via electronic means. Nationwide, it costs consumers $4.69 to withdraw money from a so-called out-of-network ATM. That’s up 2.6% from a year ago, according to the latest data from Bankrate Inc., a New York City-based …

Add Sonic Drive-In to the roster of merchants that have experienced a breach of their payments systems. The Oklahoma City-based fast-food chain confirmed to Digital Transaction News that it has been investigating the incident. On Tuesday, security blog KrebsOnSecurity.com reported the breach affecting an unknown number of Sonic’s point-of-sale systems. …

Citing the recent huge data breach at credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc., the National Retail Federation and other trade groups in a letter to Congressional leaders said any new federal law governing data-breach notifications should apply to all industries that handle consumer data. The groups want a uniform federal standard to replace the …

In anticipation of an upcoming PCI Security Standards Council specification for enabling PIN-on-glass transactions with consumer mobile devices, MagicCube released MC-Screen Shield, a back-end technology to help secure the PIN. PIN-on-glass technology—in which the PIN is entered via a display instead of using a dedicated PIN pad—has been available for …

The Federal Reserve issued a paper outlining “refreshed strategies and nine new tactics” for improving the U.S. payment system; the paper is a follow-up to the Fed’s strategic vision for payments issued in January 2015 and comes in the wake of the July report from the Fed’s Faster Payments Task Force. The Federal Trade …

The Faster Payments Task Force issued a final report in July with an eye-popping goal: National, real-time payments by 2020. Here’s a guide to the 16 providers that might just do the job. In July, the Federal Reserve-sponsored Faster Payments Task Force capped off two years of hard work with …