Yardi, a payment service for property managers, introduced a feature in its Yardi Bill Pay service that lets managers make payments using single-use Mastercard virtual card numbers issued by Fifth Third Bank. Allied Wallet released what it said are new open application programming interface tools for its payment gateway, NextGen. …

Distributed ledgers are slowly but steadily working their way into mainstream financial applications. That means the time has come to understand how blockchain works—and to take the technology more seriously, says Esther Pigg. Despite all the hype surrounding it, blockchain—or “distributed-ledger technology” (DLT)—remains a complicated mystery to many. Here is …

The mobile-payments giants Alipay and WeChat Pay  are working hard to expand acceptance outside China, and the United States is a prime market. Here’s what that could mean for U.S. merchants— and for the comparatively less successful U.S. wallets. In the four years since its launch, Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment …

A divided Supreme Court says American Express Co.’s anti-steering rules for merchants don’t violate antitrust law. What does that mean for card payments, especially with another big card-related court case heading for a settlement? The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 decision upholding American Express Co.’s anti-steering rules for merchants has …

Vetting a new merchant takes a lot of work, but the plethora of nontraditional data may make it a little easier. How do you tell the difference between a bot applying for a merchant account and an actual human doing it? The answer might lie in social-media profiles and a …

Canada’s finance ministry last month issued its latest merchant-friendly announcement regarding payment cards, this one disclosing agreements with Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. for an average 10-basis-point reduction in credit card interchange for small and mid-size businesses to take effect in 2020. The Department of Finance Canada also said American …

At the end of July came an opening for nonbank payments players that, as the old expression goes, you could drive a Mack truck through. And it’s our guess that we’ll be hearing much more about this opening—and about how financial-technology firms and other nonbanks are exploiting it—for quite some …

The panelists were not subtle in assessing the future of digital currencies and the decentralized blockchain technology behind them. “Cryptocurrencies and blockchain will take over the world, it will be a bigger impact on the world than the Internet,” said investment banker Dennis O’Neill, chief executive of Chicago-based O’Neill Capital …

In its latest update about the U.S. conversion from magnetic-stripe to EMV chip cards, Visa Inc. said more than 3.1 million merchant locations accepted chip cards as of June versus only 392,000 in September 2015. The number of Visa chip cards increased 214% in that time to 499.7 million. Some …

Merchant processor Payment Data Systems Inc. said its FiCentive prepaid card subsidiary will provide program management and processing and develop Web and mobile applications for University Fancards, which offers university-branded gift and reloadable prepaid cards. Speedpay Inc., Western Union’s bill-payment unit, has adopted a customer-guidance tool based on artificial intelligence …