After long belittling near-field communication technology by joking that its acronym, NFC, stands for “Not for Commerce,” PayPal Inc. before the end of the year will launch a new version of its mobile wallet featuring, yes, NFC. PayPal, which has been working with NFC in Australia, will replace its current …

The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this spring climbed on a regulatory bandwagon that has federal agencies attacking disfavored industries by going after the payment processors that serve those industries. The CFPB named four merchant-acquiring companies as defendants in a lawsuit against six people and their associated debt-collection companies. The …

Bitcoin had a rough first quarter, leaving open questions about its ability to break into the mainstream of global payments. But that didn’t stop investment cash, which poured at a record rate into startups supporting the digital currency. So says a quarterly report released last month by Coindesk Research, which …

Security Notes Shopping is an emotional experience. Shops lure us, play us, and make us shop and pay against any and all rationality. Only now, technology is about to redress that imbalance. The biggest impact will be felt by ordinary commodities. No one gets overly excited about buying eggs or …

Improving online conversion rates, especially for mobile commerce, depends on providing many options for faster checkout experiences. That’s the assertion of the newly released “Mobile Commerce Forecast 2015-2018” from Mark Beccue Consulting Inc. Beccue predicts that global mobile-commerce payment volume will grow from $187.5 billion in 2014 to $744 billion …

It’s becoming a familiar refrain in the payments industry: Payments made using mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, continue to garner more and more traction. The latest Mobile Payments Index from international payments company Adyen finds that such payments accounted for 27.2% of total global online payments made …

Visa Inc.’s branding and marketing strengths were what won Costco Wholesale Corp. over from American Express Co. in a set of exclusive acceptance and cobrand agreements announced early in March, according to Visa chief executive Charles W. Scharf, who spoke Thursday afternoon during a conference call to discuss Visa’s results …

Brian V. Mooney, who on Tuesday took over as interim chief executive of the retailer-controlled Merchant Customer Exchange LLC payments consortium, brings strengths to the organization that could prove valuable when MCX at last launches its long-awaited CurrentC mobile-payments system, sources tell Digital Transactions News. And, by some accounts, he …

Transaction volumes, revenues and profits all headed up smartly for MasterCard Inc. in the first quarter. But MasterCard on Wednesday also reported laying out nearly $900 million in rebates and incentives during the quarter to build future volume in an increasingly competitive global card marketplace. In the United States, total …

MasterCard Inc. announced Monday it is spending $600 million to buy Applied Predictive Technologies Inc., an Arlington, Va.-based company that provides analytics services to retailers, financial institutions, and other companies. The deal, expected to close in the second quarter, provides MasterCard with yet another service for merchants. “Merchants, like financial …