By John Stewart Larger screens, buy buttons, and streamlined checkouts are expected to combine to raise the profile of smart phones in e-commerce. And now there are numbers to show just how much retail sales volume the devices will generate. Smart phones will account for $27.7 billion in retail mobile …

Atlanta-based merchant processor Global Payments Inc. will use mobile point-of-sale apps from Apriva Inc. to service its merchants wanting EMV-capable mPOS, Apriva announced Tuesday. The deal sees the AprivaPay Plus app, available for iOS and Android devices, branded with the Global Payments name. Such branded, or white-labeled, agreements enable companies …

While many payments firms have complained about the expensive and time-consuming process of getting state money-transmitter licenses, and, more recently, of potentially needing licenses to operate virtual currencies, the regulatory pendulum occasionally swings the other way. Late last month, Illinois quietly dropped a 2013 cease-and-desist order against merchant processor Square …

By John Stewart Why won’t Verizon Wireless make nice with Samsung Pay? With the U.S. debut of Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.’s mobile-payments service just a few days away—and a national launch of Samsung Pay due Sept. 28—all the major mobile network operators have signed on to support the service with …

By John Stewart Evidence emerged this week that the Durbin Amendment may not be cutting debit card acceptance costs for merchants as effectively as its backers intended. Nor has it prompted many merchants to pass on their savings to consumers, according to a paper published in Economic Quarterly, a publication …

The transition to an EMV-based payment card system in the United States could spur a long and sophisticated series of criminal attacks designed to separate consumers and banks from their funds. That’s one possible consequence, says Michael Bruemmer, vice president at Experian Information Solutions Inc.’s Data Breach Resolution group. “Cyber …

The debut of Samsung Pay in the United States is just a month away, but the ongoing migration of U.S. credit and debit cards to the EMV chip standard may already be eroding the nascent mobile-payment service’s unique advantage. Samsung Pay uses near-field communication (NFC) and, uniquely, a radio-frequency version …

By John Stewart Just 45 days to go until the Oct. 1 deadline for EMV in the United States, and among the issues over which merchants are still wrangling with banks is whether EMV chip cards should be universally issued with PINs—credit cards as well as debit. Merchant groups have …

Many news accounts of PayPal Holdings Inc.’s spinoff from parent company eBay Inc. noted that PayPal’s market capitalization was in the $50 billion range, but few provided context on where that placed the company among its publicly traded peers. Turns out, PayPal instantly became the fourth-largest payments player, trailing only …

By John Stewart A new service from Square Inc. that accelerates merchants’ access to their funds in return for a 1% fee is likely to gain popularity among the small sellers that primarily use Square for transaction processing, according to some observers. That may hand Square a key advantage in …