Amazon.com Inc. said Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is generally available to U.S. merchants and developers. The service enables consumers using Alexa, the voice assistant embedded in Amazon’s Echo devices, to pay for purchases with information already stored in their Amazon accounts. Alexa users grant the merchant’s skill permission to …

Since its official launch last June, Zelle has been all about carving out a healthy piece of the burgeoning person-to-person payments market for financial institutions. Now it’s promoting another service that leverages its network but could prove far more lucrative: disbursements. When companies, associations, or other organizations need to pay …

Strong consumer spending and a benign world economy worked in Mastercard Inc.’s favor in the first quarter, lifting the network’s U.S. purchase volume by nearly 11% and profits by over 30%. The No. 2 payment card network by volume on Wednesday reported that U.S. purchase volume rose 11% to $359 …

Toast, a 7-year-old provider of point-of-sale and payments software to restaurants, has launched its first POS device, a handheld that servers can use to accept payments and handle other functions. The device replaces a Samsung model the company used. Commerce platform Shopify Inc. reported transactions from mobile devices amounted to …

Despite what you hear about electronic payments displacing coins and folding money, the real story is a little more complicated. The world is flat. Or at least that’s what most people believed until Aristotle around 330 B.C. provided evidence of a spherical Earth. Even then, it was slow to catch …

General-purpose mobile wallets have yet to convince most merchants and consumers that they have real value. Can that change, and if so, when? The hype over mobile wallets hasn’t ceased ever since Google Checkout launched way back in 2006, and it’s only become louder since Apple Inc. unveiled Apple Pay …

Have you ever seen a bank note marked “One Negative US dollar”? Have you ever tossed a “negative dime?” Can you even think of any meaning for such entities? What is impossible for physical money is a simple tag for digital currency. It is not just easy to mint, it …

Processing giant First Data Corp. said on Monday Walmart Inc. has added Star signature debit acceptance to its roster of payment options. The company also noted that its integrated payments business continues to grow. Both observations came during the Atlanta-based company’s first-quarter earnings call with equity analysts. For the quarter, …

With digital-payments providers emerging all over the world to serve local and international consumers, the search is on for synchronized, standardized networks to transfer funds cross-border. Ripple, the San Francisco-based provider of distributed-ledger payments, says it has the answer, and late last week five payments services overseas signed on to …

      by Computer Services, Inc. (CSI) Now, more than ever, achieving a 360-degree view of customers is essential for optimized and effective anti-money laundering (AML) compliance. Financial institutions, including banks, investment firms, and insurers—and the services they offer both retail and corporate customers—have grown in size and complexity …