When Apple Inc. this fall launched its latest smart phone, the iPhone 5, without a near-field communication (NFC) chipset, the move was widely seen as a blow to the prospects for NFC as a technology for mobile payments. Now comes a report estimating just how damaging that blow could be. …

After five years of development, an ATM technology company with its eyes on the prepaid card market says its business model of selling prepaid cards through ATMs is ready for prime time. As evidence, Better ATM Services Inc. on Tuesday announced it would enable the sale of a Discover-branded gift …

If the start of the holiday-shopping season this year has demonstrated anything, it is the new prominence of mobile in the mix of payments. But for all the talk among online merchants about mobile payments, not all will benefit equally from the trend, according to Bill Ready, chief executive of …

Merchants and their various industry trade groups have spent quite a lot of time—not to mention money—on lobbying for regulations to control interchange costs. And not without success. In 2010, they got Congress to add the Durbin Amendment, which caps debit interchange for the biggest issuers, to the massive Dodd-Frank …

If there’s a weak link in the chain of card-data security, it’s small merchants. Many of them represent easy targets for hackers and other data thieves. Worse, the businesses themselves don’t see themselves as vulnerable, and far too many remain unaware of security protocols like the Payment Card Industry data-security …

Jane Adler With an April deadline looming, industry observers’ doubts are growing that merchant processors will be ready to handle EMV transactions. Nothing inspires like a deadline. Just ask the merchant acquirers and processors that face a quickly approaching April deadline to be ready to process EMV or chip card …

Jim Daly The Royal Canadian Mint held a first-of-its-kind competition this year to spawn ideas for virtual cash. Could some of these ideas solve the problem of the high cost of low-value electronic payments? From Silicon Valley to India, almost the entire world is bubbling with new ideas for electronic …

Loyalty systems, rapidly adaptable mobile and e-commerce technology, and data-security applications are attracting lots of venture capital. Here’s a look into the minds of investors. Hint: They’re not too keen on NFC. Peter Lucas If you want to know what the next hot new company in the payments industry will …

Lauri Giesen Many in the payments industry fault value-added resellers for lax data security, an accusation VARs resent. What’s the real story, and how are VARs working to make their products more secure? Most retailers and their merchant acquirers and third-party processors take careful measures to assure that fraudsters can’t …

Fewer than two months after a competitor announced a similar deal, wireless payments provider Apriva Inc. this week reported that it would continue offering pre-Durbin Amendment discounted acceptance pricing on Visa cards to vending-machine operators. Debit card interchange in late 2011 became a major concern for vending-machine operators and other …