Peter Lucas The creature of the nation’s biggest wireless carriers dumped its payments-network strategy a year ago, and now things are looking up for its mobile wallet. The key difference: an emphasis on offers and rewards. It won’t be long before the eyes of the payment industry focus on Salt …

Lauri Giesen As EFT networks hunt for new business in the era of the Durbin Amendment, MoneyPass is expanding beyond its comfortable ATM space to link banks to point-of-sale PIN-debit services. Most of the headlines in the general press about the Durbin Amendment in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform law focused …

Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

Eric Grover Low acceptance costs, convenience, and security aren’t enough. As this global review of would-be PayPals and Visas shows, startups need a clear path to a mass of users. With the advent of mobile payments, we read almost daily about new payments startups. And this avalanche of startups follows …

Ashok Joshi, P.E. Public transportation is a natural for contactless chip card payments, but issues remain, such as whether and when to use a PIN. The experience in London may hold some answers for U.S. deployments. The payment industry is always trying to simplify the user experience while paying close …

PayPal’s bold new strategy for the physical point of sale faces daunting challenges that will require the young company to accept lower margins, work with ISOs, revamp systems, and chop transaction costs, says René M. Pelegero. Unfortunately, ISOs perceive PayPal as the enemy. Thus, PayPal needs to develop, and quickly …

For years, the growth of electronic payments has been fueled by the conversion of check writers into card users at the point of sale, but now those days may be coming to an end. Research, as well as the experience of one major retail chain, indicates the check writers who …

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released data about banks’ debit card interchange income now that the Durbin Amendment is in effect. Not surprisingly, the numbers show that interchange for regulated card issuers plunged. The nation’s leading retailer trade group took the occasion to decry the Fed, even though merchants …

One year after its creation, a database of merchants and processors that generate suspect automated clearing house transactions doesn’t have a whole lot of data yet. Backers of the Terminated Originator Database (TOD), however, expect the database to grow rapidly this year and next as word of the project spreads …

The re-terminalization of the merchant point of sale to accept EMV chip cards could generate more than $6 billion in revenues for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but the changeover is fraught with competitive and operational risks, according to a new research report by Aite Group LLC. Aite …