There’s clearly consumer demand to speed up settlement, and it’s been done overseas. The challenges here, though, are formidable, starting with defining just what ‘real time’ is. By Jim Daly Doctors often tell their harried patients to slow down, but in payments it’s just the opposite. In an effort to …

Mitchell Cobrin Americans like a sure thing, which is not proving helpful when it comes to figuring out chip card deployment. Better to identify promising markets, like m-commerce, and recruit partners with expertise. EMV technology, or the point-of-sale payment protocol based on Europe’s Europay-MasterCard-Visa card system, has arrived on U.S. …

Selling small businesses on mobile payments is an exercise in frustration, but signs of a breakthrough are appearing where the benefits are most obvious—restaurants, says Rick Berry. There is a lingering perception among the smaller business owners that mobile is out of their reach, too expensive, and too complicated to …

  The fledgling Chase Merchant Services operation may now have a boss, but that doesn’t mean the considerable industry curiosity about the JPMorgan Chase & Co. payments unit is going to be quenched any time soon. Chase officials, beginning with newly appointed CMS chief executive Mike Passilla, are playing it …

A plan to expand its footprint in mobile payments by offering white-label applications to merchants is quickly paying dividends for LevelUp, the mobile-payments unit of Boston-based SCVNGR Inc. Washington D.C.-based Sweetgreen, a 17-location chain of organic salad shops, has become the first LevelUp merchant to roll out a branded mobile-payment …

  Good news for independent sales organizations: authorization costs continued their long-term decline over the past two years, according to a recent industry survey. Not-so-good news: clearing and settlement costs have stopped declining, customer-service costs are rising, and processors are eyeing new fees to generate revenues from ISOs. Omaha-based The …

  Google Inc. released a trio of announcements on Wednesday concerning its Google Wallet mobile-payments application, but even taken together these did not add up to the major overhaul of the product that Google promised last fall. Google’s news included: a Wallet-based person-to-person payments service that works with Gmail, Google’s …

  The nascent trend toward tablets as cash-register replacements took several big steps forward this week, as technology players and at least one processor unveiled major promotions, including free transaction processing and other pricing deals, to entice small businesses to adopt mobile payments. On Wednesday, merchant processor Vantiv Inc. launched …

Often regarded as the enemy, officials from the federal government gave some friendly advice to merchant acquirers last week about what regulators are concerned with regarding payments, including mobile payments, prepaid cards, and fraud control. The recommendations came during a government panel Thursday at the Electronic Transactions Association’s annual conference …

Lauri Giesen The early battles in the debit-network war triggered by the Durbin Amendment took a big toll on Visa’s Interlink brand, but now Visa has converted an obscure program into a powerful weapon. How are the EFT networks responding? Before April 2012, making a decision about which network over …