Token Specs: Curb Your Enthusiasm The three biggest card networks would just like everybody to calm down. As dramatic as their joint tokenization announcement was last month, key officials with Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and American Express Co. have been at pains to tamp down the far-reaching industry speculation the …

Kevin Woodward Tech players that have entered payments aren’t looking to make their living from transaction fees. That may put traditional acquirers on edge, but two can play this game. For as long as anyone can remember, electronic transactions have carried fees for processing. These fees have excited plenty of …

Jim Daly Data-breach insurance has become a mainstream product in the merchant-acquiring business, but some executives say PCI compliance and diligent security practices negate the need to buy coverage. What’s next? The unnerving reality that credit and debit card-accepting merchants and their processors can have their computer systems hacked spawned …

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 …

Some dragons are harder to slay than others, and a few are fire-breathing. Here’s our annual look at the industry’s fiercest beasts, this time ranging from the endless war over interchange to eager-beaver regulators to the woes of digital currency. By John Stewart and Jim Daly If payments were easy, …

To drive innovation and adoption, providers should stay close to the pain points of their customers. To achieve mass adoption of mobile payments, retailers, banks, and vendors must be prepared to serve a radically different customer, says Souheil Badran. Souheil Badran is senior vice president and general manager at Digital …

For two years, Google Inc. and Verizon Wireless have been at odds, with Verizon blocking the online search giant’s access to SIM cards on Verizon devices for Google Wallet. But on Thursday Google released a new version of its Android mobile operating system that not only slices through that Gordian …

U.S. bank card purchase volumes rose in the 10% range in the quarter ending Sept. 30, with MasterCard Inc. growing faster than Visa Inc. in debit and Visa gaining faster than MasterCard in credit. MasterCard on Thursday reported total U.S. credit, charge, and debit card purchase volume of $267 billion, …

Crowdfunding organizations that work with payment service provider WePay Inc., and have integrated WePay’s application programming interface into their Web sites, are creating $1.5 million in daily payments for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company. That is three times more than two years ago, WePay says. n WePay, founded in 2008, …

In a bid to forge closer ties to the increasingly important business of creating and marketing mobile apps and other software products, PayPal Inc. this week announced it is waiving transaction-processing fees for nascent developers in a new program it calls Startup Blueprint. The offer is limited to $50,000 in …