Sixty-two percent of U.S. consumers used a credit card in 2018, up from 60% in 2017, finds a report from Mercator Advisory Group Bestpass Inc., a provider of toll-management services for commercial fleets, said it finished 2018 with 500,000 active transponders in its network of almost 6,000 clients. The fastest …

With the enactment of data-breach notification laws in South Dakota and Alabama in 2018, all 50 states now have such laws, according to the Covington & Burling LLP law firm. Financial-institution processor Fiserv Inc. said the newly chartered Mi Bank in Bloomfield Township, Mich., will use a variety of Fiserv …

To make faster payments a reality, decades-old core systems have to be streamlined. Here’s an approach that relies on artificial intelligence to avoid the system overhauls that have been tried in the past. The Federal Reserve’s faster-payments initiative has created a catalyst to improve core systems to respond to the …

A network-sponsored spec for streamlined digital payments rolls toward implementation later this year, promising cleaner checkouts but also stirring questions about how it will work. Remember all the excitement last spring about a so-called common buy button the major card networks were working on (“The Shared Checkout’s Slow Check-in,” June)? …

In just a matter of months, this new e-commerce fraud has emerged to exploit weak or non-existent links between merchants’ online and physical stores. If you’re a retailer, what’s not to like about offering consumers the option to buy online and pick up in-store? Most customers who use the service …

A subsidiary of Visa Inc. is offering to buy Earthport PLC, a London-based provider of cross-border payments for banks and businesses, for approximately $250 million in cash. The offer represents a 250% premium to Earthport’s six-month average share price ended Dec. 24 and has the endorsement of Earthport’s board of …

A big office lease in downtown Oakland, Calif., suggests merchant processor Square Inc. is about to embark on a big expansion. Square on Thursday signed a lease for an entire 356,000-square-foot building that once was a Sears department store and after that was briefly owned by the ride-sharing firm Uber. …

Merchants have come a long way since the inception of the Merchant Advisory Group, but far more needs to be done to restore some semblance of balance in payments. Upon reflection, it is remarkable that traditional merchants had no formal means to get together to discuss payments until the MAG …

E-commerce technology provider 3dcart said its merchants can now offer Bread, an online financing service for consumer purchases, to their shoppers. Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) said consumers can redeem rewards points instantly at the pump at approximately 13,400 Shell stations nationwide through a new agreement between FIS and …

With the onset of digital wallets, observers of the payments scene might expect consumer demand for cash to wither, and with it the population of ATMs. It turns out the ATM count worldwide did hit its zenith last year, according to research released this week, but the reason is a …