Elizabeth Whalen The online retailing giant has been processing payments for other merchants for years, and has quietly amassed more than 200 million user accounts. Now it’s offering even slicker, faster payment services. Retail giant Amazon.com is no stranger to accepting consumer payments on its own and other Web sites, …

By Kevin Woodward With the invasion of smart phones and tablets, the iconic payment terminal—and the entire point of sale—is getting a new look. Are the traditional terminal’s days numbered? Perhaps no other device serves as an icon of the payments industry like the point-of-sale terminal. Sitting on a merchant’s …

There will be no “one wallet to rule them all.” The phone itself is the new mobile wallet, not any one app. Mobile wallets are more about marketing than about payments, and a white-label approach will let banks and merchants keep control of the vital customer data they need, says …

Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards will come to the U.S., but probably not before the payment card networks postpone current deadlines and offer strong incentives for merchants that might include interchange relief and dumping the signature as a cardholder- verification method, according to a new research report from Celent LLC. Card …

ABnote is adding support for near-field communication (NFC) technology to its miWallet mobile wallet with the addition of the Wave device from Israeli technology vendor On Track Innovations Ltd., ABnote recently announced. The device connects to mobile devices using the audio jack on smart phones and tablets. When connected, it …

It’s been one bump after another for the Chicago Transit Authority’s new Ventra fare-payment system that includes a contactless prepaid MasterCard Inc. card. The latest came today when the chairman of a Chicago-area transportation oversight board dubbed Ventra’s rollout a “systemic failure” and called for an audit of the fare …

How to improve the U.S. payment system? Figure out a way to make electronic payments faster and more secure, as well as a system that would connect various closed-loop payment networks with hundreds of millions accounts. And reduce regulation, too. Those were some of the ideas bandied about Thursday at …

Independent sales organizations and other acquirers could exploit Google Inc.’s move to decouple mobile payments based on near-field communication technology from a phone-based secure element, observers say. At the same time, much depends on how the mobile carriers, which have held tight control over the secure element, react to Google’s …

Should Discover Financial Services sell its network business? That’s the intriguing question raised by an analyst at investment-banking firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in a report assessing how mobile devices and related technologies are rapidly reshaping the payments industry. Sanjay Sakhrani, a managing director at New York City-based KBW, argues …

Token Specs: Curb Your Enthusiasm The three biggest card networks would just like everybody to calm down. As dramatic as their joint tokenization announcement was last month, key officials with Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and American Express Co. have been at pains to tamp down the far-reaching industry speculation the …