Slow acceptance among merchants and consumers appears to be the underlying cause for Bling Nation’s decision to suspend operation of its PayConnect and FanConnect mobile services. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Bling said earlier this week that it is pausing operations to retool its services in response to feedback from merchants …

  n n n The source of such fears is a fast-changing landscape in which all the payment card networks are looking for new revenues and markets. “Some of my clients are freaking out, without naming names,” says Adil Moussa, an analyst at Boston-based Aite. Card networks are already direct …

  All Signs Point to Credit Cards’ Recovery   After getting KO’d in the recession, credit card usage is back on its feet. While card issuers are more cautious than they were a few years ago, consumers who have credit cards are using them more frequently, and they are spending …

  Linda Punch   So-called friendly fraud is hard to detect, hard to prove, and rising for some merchants. What are merchants, acquirers, and tech companies doing to reduce it?   It may be one of the most frustrating types of fraud encountered by a merchant. So-called friendly fraud—also known …

  American Express Co. will step up marketing of its Serve digital payment system early in the third quarter, following encouraging results from a pilot in Eugene, Ore., says David Messenger, executive vice president of online and mobile, American Express. “We’ve done a market test in Eugene and got some …

  n The first eBay/PayPal executive to go to Google, Stephanie Tilenius, aggressively pursued Osama Bedier, PayPal’s reluctant mobile-payments man, long before her separation agreement permitted her to do so, according to the suit. And Bedier discussed potential employment with Google while simultaneously negotiating a major business deal for PayPal …

  The world’s airlines are seeing less fraud these days in their online bookings, thanks to more experience with Web-based ticket sales and wider usage of fraud-fighting tools, according to a study released on Wednesday. Overall, online fraud for air carriers dropped 31%, from $1.7 billion to $1.4 billion, between …

Marketing via social-network tools, long thought to be a feature primarily of e-commerce, is rapidly moving to the physical point of sale as merchants seek new ways to generate sales and independent sales organizations look for ways to differentiate themselves. This move to the point of sale, meanwhile, has been …

In another indication that micropayments are staging a comeback, Live Gamer Inc. and Skrill Holdings Ltd. on Tuesday announced an integrated platform that lets game publishers collect small sums from users around the world without chargeback or foreign-exchange risk. The integration also represents the U.S. debut of London-based Skrill, which …

Probably no pathway in electronic payments is more littered with the wreckage of failed processors than that of micropayments. But recent moves by publishers to charge for content is helping fuel renewed interest in the business of processing tiny transactions. Google Inc., for example, has developed a micropayments engine to help …