By John Stewart Acting in response to comment from the industry, the PCI Security Standards Council has extended a key security deadline for payments processors, merchants, and banks by fully two years. These players now have until June 30, 2018, to stop using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption and instead …

The low cost and convenience of peer-to-peer payments may be ready to cannibalize a portion of the traditional wire-transfer market, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. The report also finds that mobile P2P is important to all consumers, not just Millennials, often considered the most likely …

The conversion of U.S. mall and Main Street retailers to EMV chip card acceptance continues to lift VeriFone Systems Inc.’s North American revenues, but now the leading U.S.-based point-of-sale terminal maker and payment-services provider is getting ready for a rush of orders from petroleum marketers preparing to meet a key …

By Steve Norell I started in the acquiring industry approximately 20 years ago, and during those 20 years have seen and heard just about everything one can imagine about the way our products and services are marketed. That’s especially true when it comes to deceptive and fraudulent practices. During those …

By John Stewart It operates so much in the background that many payments professionals may not have noticed, but the automated clearing house network is on a hot streak. The 41-year-old system notched a 5.9% year-over-year increase in transactions in the quarter ended Sept. 30, reaching a total of 4.83 …

By John Stewart Ever since the launch of Apple Pay more than a year ago, mobile wallets have followed a pattern of recruiting financial institutions to enable their network-branded credit and debit cards to work in the wallet apps. But retailers are getting in on this action, as well, with …

Attorneys for financial-institution plaintiffs suing Target Corp. to recoup their costs arising from Target’s massive 2013 data breach announced a $39.4 million settlement on Wednesday intended to bring their class-action lawsuit against the big-box retailer to an end. A U.S. District Court judge in St. Paul, Minn., was expected to …

Visa Inc. ended months of speculation with its decision, announced last month, to buy its European counterpart, London-based Visa Europe Ltd., in a cash, stock, and earn-out deal valued at $23.4 billion. The deal without question holds huge potential, but questions linger about its financial impact. “We’re delighted to be …

Clear away the coin part, and what Bitcoin invented may very well be a better infrastructure for payments: the blockchain. The blockchain is a distributed ledger that logs and confirms transactions based on user consensus. To paraphrase Sarah Martin of the Digital Currency Council, blockchain is a distributed database and …

  With the POS conversion in progress, the next step is to accommodate EMV chip cards in ATMs. That will require planning, money, and expertise. With the EMV liability shift for the point of sale well under way, the next big step in the transformation of the U.S. payment industry …