The cessation of the cobranded Costco Wholesale Corp. credit card issued by American Express Co. moved another step closer with Monday’s announcement that Citigroup will buy the AmEx Costco portfolio for an unspecified sum. Citi’s acquisition of the portfolio is expected to close this summer. That’s when Citi will begin to …

  The October 1, 2015 deadline for EMV compliance has come and gone, yet many U.S. merchants have not yet upgraded to EMV terminals and cannot accept NFC payments like Apple Pay™. As the industry upgrades to new, user-friendly and secure technologies, sales partners find themselves in a great situation …

Many consumers will find it easier to make onboard entertainment purchases when flying on Southwest Airlines Inc. now that the airline is accepting Pay with Amazon. Announced Wednesday, the service enables Southwest passengers who have stored payment data in their Amazon.com Inc. accounts to pay with those credentials. To pay for …

Canada’s Interac Association PIN-based debit card network once again is reporting lower fraud losses as the country’s conversion to the EMV chip card standard nears completion. The Toronto-based network said Thursday that fraud losses from skimming, in which card data are stolen from the magnetic stripe, to financial institutions that …

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced its own mobile wallet, Chase Pay, in October, it said the new payments service would begin rolling out by the middle of this year, and on Tuesday the money-center bank announced an important step in that direction. The fledgling service, which is up against …

Payments made via so-called wearables are forecast to soar in the years to come, so Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are positioning themselves to cash in with announcements made Monday at the huge Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. MasterCard unveiled a partnership with WiseKey, a Swiss company whose security …

A new Tennessee law governing merchants’ payment card contracts could create headaches for non-bank entities such as independent sales organizations and payment facilitators, merchant-acquiring industry sources say. The law will require processors on a monthly basis to list all fees assessed since the last statement. That’s certainly not unusual in …

Flint Mobile Inc., a startup whose app allowed merchants to process transactions by using their smart-phone camera to scan customers’ card numbers, abruptly ceased operations earlier this month and has arranged for merchants to switch over to Stripe for processing. That’s according to MerchantMaverick.com, a merchant-processing review site Flint, which …

U.S. consumers apparently held onto and used their smart phones and tablets even more than one might suspect given the increase in mobile-commerce transactions during the fourth quarter of 2015, reports Criteo, a New York City-based online marketing specialist. In its “State of Mobile Commerce Report,” released Wednesday, Criteo said …

The PCI Securities Standards Council said Wednesday that the next iteration of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard will be coming in the first half of this year, probably in March or April, about six months earlier than called for in the current update cycle. The new version, dubbed PCI …