For all the talk about merchant adoption and wallet creation, Bitcoin hasn’t found a consumer market—and probably won’t, says Nathalie Reinelt. Bitcoin isn’t really disrupting anything until it starts pulling large volumes of assets away from traditional financial institutions. That’s not likely to happen any time soon. Only days into …

Consumers are weary of dealing with the fallout from data breaches and want a better way to minimize their risk. The backers of Final, a new credit card with online-management tools that can set spending caps and produce virtual card numbers tied to specific merchants, hope to alleviate some of …

Boosted by higher transaction volumes both in the United States and abroad, MasterCard Inc. on Friday reported a 21% increase, adjusted for foreign-currency effects, in net income for 2014’s fourth quarter. The No. 2 payment network posted an $801 million profit versus $684 million a year earlier on net revenues …

A flood of payments initiatives has come out of the Valley, with more on the way. What is it about this business that gets the mercury rising out there? Where do people in payments look for innovation? Yes, some of it shows up in Boston, a little in Chicago and …

With Apple Inc.’s record results in the fourth quarter, the computer giant appears to be closing in on long-time rival Samsung for dominance in the crucial worldwide smart-phone market. Meanwhile, Samsung is working to catch up with Apple Pay, the highly publicized mobile-payments service Apple launched in October. For now, …

In the wake of an important Supreme Court decision early last week, Visa Inc.’s chief executive Thursday afternoon sounded a conciliatory note on the company’s often fraught relations with merchants and touted Visa’s digital-payments initiatives as a way of bringing more value to retailers in return for the fees they …

As mobile commerce becomes ever more important to merchants, so too does the number of mobile payments made via apps and Web sites viewed on smart phones and tablets. Along with this growth, however, is a disproportionate increase in fraud as a percent of m-commerce revenue, finds the “2014 LexisNexis …

Now that the Federal Reserve has released its plan for faster payments in the United States, observers are applauding the effort while expressing some impatience with what they see as the central bank’s overly deliberate approach. “The Fed is indeed headed in the right direction, but it is a slow …

Apple Inc. chief executive Tim Cook said Tuesday afternoon that Apple’s new Apple Pay mobile-payment service is doing well three months after its launch, but he gave few details during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call. “Apple Pay is off to a very strong start,” Cook said in his opening …

In a blueprint released Monday for a faster and more secure U.S. payments system, the Federal Reserve called for industry task forces to form early this year and for a “framework” to emerge by 2016 to set rules for near real-time payments. The banking regulator also set out five broad, …