Breach-notification laws, misbehaving merchants, and online sales tax legislation are just three potential hotspots for legislation and regulation in 2015, advise payments industry attorneys. Long a wish-list item for many, a uniform, national breach-notification law could see enactment in 2015, thanks —unfortunately—to the flurry of large-and small-scale payment card data …

Strategies By John Stewart Thanks to new players, new tech, and new data sources, access to funding has never been so plentiful for small but growing merchants. The payments industry often celebrates small merchants as the breeding ground of transaction growth. After all, as they start up, they offer new …

In short order, competition in the business of funding small merchants has ratcheted up to new highs, with new, online and technology-based entrants flooding the market. One of the most recent, and successful, of these new entrants is Atlanta-based Kabbage Inc., which this year will hit the $500 million mark …

  Shopify Inc. can eliminate learning new languages from its list of objectives. The online-commerce company announced this week it was adding 2Checkout’s payment technology, which processes payments in 26 currencies in 196 countries, to its POS software. The move does not displace the back-end payment-processing compact between Shopify and …

To bring cart abandonment back down to earth, e-marketers need to fix their mobile payments and promotions systems—and they don’t have much time, says Ralph Dangelmaier. For mobile conversion rates to meet or surpass non-mobile benchmarks, the mobile checkout and payment process needs to be frictionless, intuitive, marketing-savvy, and global-aware. …

NCR Corp.’s announcement this week that it has updated its iPad-based point-of-sale system, which it sells as NCR Silver, to support loyalty programs shone a spotlight on one of the few tablet POS products that comes from a major corporation in a market that has attracted a raft of startups. …

Jim Daly It’s been two-and-a-half years since a Visa plan marked the unofficial start of the conversion of U.S. card payments to the EMV chip card standard. Will recent data breaches speed up the conversion’s snail’s pace? While still a Congressman, current Chicago mayor and former White House chief of …

Peter Lucas Having invested in new equipment, payment card manufacturers are ready to churn out EMV cards by the millions in the U.S. But issuers that wait too long could be caught short. Common in nearly all of the developed world, Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards have been a long time …

  Consumers making purchases with the Chicago Transit Authority’s coming Ventra combination transit and general-purpose MasterCard prepaid card are expected to incur maximum user fees of $8.45 in a given month, provided the cardholder triggers all the expected fees in that time period, according to processor First Data Corp. The …

In a move that could herald a time when card issuers will be able to mass produce specialized cards equipped with near-field communication (NFC) technology, Datacard Group on Monday announced it has taken an equity stake in DeviceFidelity Inc., a Richardson, Texas-based startup that makes micro Secure Digital (SD) cards …