Loyalty systems, rapidly adaptable mobile and e-commerce technology, and data-security applications are attracting lots of venture capital. Here’s a look into the minds of investors. Hint: They’re not too keen on NFC. Peter Lucas If you want to know what the next hot new company in the payments industry will …

Look for the real-time payments revolution to start in an unlikely place, the long-derided world of P2P payments, says Steve Mott. Payment networks are seemingly locked in the physical world. They expect compensation and eschew risk as if P2P or any real-time debit mechanism will behave like plastic cards. Steve …

The reports about consumer spending over the long Thanksgiving shopping period extending into today, Cyber Monday, continue to flow ad nauseam in the mainstream press. Digital Transactions News sifted through the statistical stew to find the numerical nuggets of greatest interest to merchant acquirers. The early data indicate that, when …

With the fabled Cyber Monday shopping frenzy under way, Visa Inc. launched an authentication tool for online transactions intended to cut fraud while reducing the risk of shopping-cart abandonment. The tool, which Visa calls its Consumer Authentication Service, can be deployed by any Visa issuer starting on Monday. The network …

Venture-capital and private-equity investors are on pace to meet or exceed the $753 million they infused into the payments industry in 2011, the most since the $1.4 billion they invested in payments in 2001. Through the first three quarters of 2012, venture-capital and private-equity investors pumped $711 million into startup …

With deadlines fast approaching for U.S. merchants, acquirers, and other payments players to adopt the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard, vendors are stepping forward with ideas to simplify readiness. One of the latest of these is a concept that asks why chip transactions can’t be managed by remote servers—why, in …

Just when observers might have thought the mobile-acceptance market couldn’t get more crowded, merchant processor Bank of America Merchant Services LLC on Tuesday announced a service called Mobile Pay on Demand. And while the service includes the now familiar card-reading dongle for attachment to a smart phone, it also features …

Closed-loop gift cards can expect to see an increase of more than 5% in holiday load volume over 2011’s loads, according to a new forecast from Mercator Advisory Group Inc., which researches the prepaid card industry. Mercator predicts loads on closed-loop gift cards will hit $43.2 billion from Nov. 1 …

With its core daily-deal market getting crowded, market leader Groupon Inc. recently made two moves that position the company as a rival of independent sales organizations, value-added resellers, PayPal Inc., and others trolling for mobile-payments transactions from small merchants. In October, Chicago-based Groupon rolled out its Breadcrumb service, a point-of-sale …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@AGSgo.com In his startling 2011 book, “The Currency Wars,” James Rickards reports on financial war games conducted by the Pentagon in which our national security leaders increasingly recognize an emerging, unaddressed area of vulnerability. This vulnerability meanders through arcane Wall Street methodologies, cuts through full-blown cyber terrorism, …