Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com The three awfully young programmers intercepted me on my way to class, asking if BitMint can do micropayments. They explained that they have developed a smart-map application that colors urban streets according to crime statistics at any given hour of the day. The idea is to …

Karen Epper Hoffman After a major failure several years ago, biometrics is enjoying a renaissance in payments. As usual these days, mobile has a lot to do with it. So does the fear of fraud. Think of it as an authentication trinity—what you have, what you know, what you are. …

A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

We couldn’t recruit David Letterman to help us with this article, but what follows are the Top 10 U.S. payments events of 2013 as identified by the Retail Payments Risk Forum, a research and industry-dialogue unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 10. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized …

Target Corp. on Friday confirmed that data thieves obtained customers’ encrypted debit card PINs, but said the sensitive numbers remain useless to the criminals because of the technology masking them. ”While we previously shared that encrypted data was obtained, this morning through additional forensics work we were able to confirm …

PayPal Inc.’s acquisition of mobile developer StackMob Inc. may help it build a talent pool to more quickly and easily deploy mobile apps, suggests one analyst. n “We are building one of the most modern, advanced development environment and infrastructure in the payments industry,” a PayPal spokesperson says. “We believe …

Consumers used smart phones or tablets to spend $962 million on holiday purchases across three key shopping days in the past week, further cementing the importance of these devices to retailers. n Adobe says 18.3% of online sales came from mobile devices on Cyber Monday, an 80% increase from last …

Co-Op Financial Services, a vendor and network provider to 3,500 credit unions serving 30 million debit card holders, is upgrading its Sprig mobile wallet with technology and services from the big processor Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) and its PayNet payment network. Sprig’s upgrade comes at a time when …

Last spring, Verizon Communications Inc. issued its latest report on data breaches, reporting that in 2012 there had been 621 such compromises involving 44.8 million records. But now it turns out that there may have been many more breaches than Verizon or anyone else can count. That’s because these uncounted …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com Whether you like Oba- ma­care or you want it repealed, you must agree that health-care payments are a major issue in need of fixing. One-seventh of the U.S. economy is stuck with choking complexity, only highlighted by the pathetic collapse of the Obamacare Web site that, …