• A consumer class-action lawsuit filed by the United Kingdom government’s former financial-services ombudsman against MasterCard Inc. seeks 14 billion pounds ($18.6 billion) in damages for allegedly charging excessive merchant fees between 1992 and 2008, expenses merchants passed on to consumers. In a statement, MasterCard said it “firmly” disagrees with …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Tech companies like Square Inc. made their reputations by rolling out simple card readers that linked to Apple Inc.’s

• Apple Inc. said it is bringing its Apple Pay mobile-payments service to Japan with its new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus smart phones, and Apple Watch Series 2. Apple Pay will work with Japan’s variant of near-field communication (NFC) contactless technology known as FeliCa. • The U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews The payments industry’s efforts to protect sensitive cardholder data and transactions are moves in the right direction. They’ll have to be, because solutions to the epidemic of data breaches and online fraud are going to have to come from the private sector and from consumers’ own precautions. …

• Noble House Hotels & Resorts, which earlier said it had been notified by the U.S. Secret Service about a possible card-data breach at its Ocean Key Resort & Spa, said it has found through an investigation that card data may have been compromised at 11 other hotels, restaurants, and …

A sweeping 4-year-old settlement between the bank card networks and banks on the one hand and merchants on the other, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned June 30, covered a lot of ground. But the case the agreement grew out of had as its central …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Gift card marketers have dominated the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions in recent years, but now a card is coming to thousands of those checkout-lane racks that will let budding investors buy or give away shares of stock in a favorite company.

How EMV is fueling a new merchant-network fight over which electronic highways debit card transactions will travel. War has broken out again between big retailers and the bank card networks. Earlier courtroom fights involved everything from honor-all-cards rules to interchange to merchants’ attempts to steer customers away from high-cost credit …

The question is, how to replace it with something more secure? One promising avenue lies in a standard developed by tech companies that belong to the FIDO Alliance. Since the birth of the personal computer, consumers have held tight to the belief that user names and passwords are secure. Those …

With a few exceptions, mobile wallets have so far held scant allure for consumers. Why is that, and what could change it? Most mobile-wallet managers don’t like to talk about it, but their products have a consumer problem—in that people who have the necessary smart phones just aren’t all that …