There’s clearly consumer demand to speed up settlement, and it’s been done overseas. The challenges here, though, are formidable, starting with defining just what ‘real time’ is. By Jim Daly Doctors often tell their harried patients to slow down, but in payments it’s just the opposite. In an effort to …

  The shutdown of digital-currency network Liberty Reserve by federal prosecutors on money-laundering charges is part of the increased focus on the virtual-currency market by regulators and law enforcement agencies, but doesn’t necessarily mean all such currencies face the same fate. While Liberty Reserve shared some common features with Bitcoin …

  Good news for independent sales organizations: authorization costs continued their long-term decline over the past two years, according to a recent industry survey. Not-so-good news: clearing and settlement costs have stopped declining, customer-service costs are rising, and processors are eyeing new fees to generate revenues from ISOs. Omaha-based The …

  It looks like mobile-deposit software developer Mitek Systems Inc. and its former ally USAA Federal Savings Bank will be going to the mat in their their patent dispute. Despite a near tripling in revenues to $3.22 million, Mitek on Tuesday reported a $2.39 million loss for fiscal 2013’s second …

The number of consumers buying stuff in stores using their mobile devices nearly tripled last year. But the Federal Reserve, which came up with that factoid, cautions mobile-payments enthusiasts not to whoop it up too much because the increase in mobile payors is not statistically significant. The Fed’s finding came …

Lauri Giesen The early battles in the debit-network war triggered by the Durbin Amendment took a big toll on Visa’s Interlink brand, but now Visa has converted an obscure program into a powerful weapon. How are the EFT networks responding? Before April 2012, making a decision about which network over …

Elizabeth Whalen While the data are mixed about ACH fraud, what banks and companies can do to keep it under control is quite clear. Recent data give mixed signals about automated clearing house fraud as the number of ACH transactions and the number and types of ACH originators grows. A …

  Can merchants make payment applications that run on smart phones secure? Yes, but only after they take some steps they might find to be difficult, according to an expert steeped in the intricacies of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI). “Smart phones were not built for taking payments, …

Linda Punch Proponents say EMV chip cards with dynamic authentication could take a real bite out of card fraud. But what does this new technology mean for PINs? As the card industry rolls out so-called EMV contact and contactless chip cards in the U.S., the technology known as dynamic data …

  Great news for mobile payments: the Federal Reserve says the percentage of consumers using a smart phone to make a purchase at the point of sale grew nearly threefold last year. Not-so-great news: don’t rely on that figure, because it’s too small to be statistically significant. Those and other …