A vendor that provides online chat services for customer acquisition and engagement appears to be the common thread in breaches disclosed Wednesday by Delta Air Lines Inc. and Sears Holdings Corp. The service provider is [24]7.ai Inc., a San Jose, Calif.-based company that provides services like virtual chat agents and …

The health-care industry is predominantly a simple, repetitive daily act carried out by millions of Americans: popping a pill. Seven out of 10 Americans are on prescription drugs. About 4 billion prescriptions are written annually, an average of 13 prescriptions per person. Taking our daily pills is our most common …

Another day, another data breach. But each one has lessons for the payments industry, and that includes the breach disclosed Tuesday by online travel-services provider Expedia Inc.’s Orbitz subsidiary. Hackers accessed one of Orbitz’s older systems and thereby may have exposed 880,000 payment card numbers on file, according to press …

Remember the good old days, when you tossed a quarter into the peddler’s jar and picked up the daily paper in the train station? Now that was frictionless. You did not know the peddler. He had no clue who you were. You did not receive any paperwork: no invoice, no …

Some 124 new data breaches have become known this year as of Feb. 16, the Identity Theft Resource Center reports. And the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors issued a study last week pegging the cost of malicious cyber activity to the economy in 2016 at $57 billion on the …

Mobile-authentication technology provider Payfone Inc. has raised another $23 million in a new funding round that included retail card payment services provider Synchrony Financial. The exact investment from Synchrony Ventures, Synchrony Financial’s venture-capital arm, wasn’t disclosed in Tuesday’s announcement. An undisclosed institutional investor led the funding round. In addition to …

It was probably only a matter of time before someone combined contactless payment, wearable devices, and cryptocurrencies. On Thursday, Fit Pay Inc. announced a device that will let users convert digital currency holdings into fiat currency for transactions at any point of sale capable of contactless interaction using near-field communication. …

Thanks to the seemingly unending epidemic of data breaches—capped by the huge breach last summer at credit-reporting titan Equifax Inc.—consumers are becoming both more aware and more cynical about the problem, according to research released Tuesday by Javelin Strategy & Research. In the wake of the Equifax case, in which …

Solutions are coming for slow speeds and high fees, says Eric Brown, who argues that even now the advantages for merchants are too good to pass up. Unless you spent last year living under a rock, you know that cryptocurrency is a sizzling-hot topic right now. Bitcoin’s price and daily …

Wearables, a hot sector within the booming Internet of Things, are being outfitted with new payments technology. Will wearables generate a tide or just a trickle of new electronic payment transactions? The idea of enabling smart watches, fitness trackers, and other Internet-connected wearable devices to make contactless electronic payments is …