Square Inc. on Tuesday pulled back the curtain, at least a little bit, on its Cash App and the related Cash Card, a Visa-branded debit card. The app has 7 million active users, and cardholders spent $90 million using the card in December, good for annualized volume of $1 billion, …

The electronic funds transfer networks continue to diversify their services as competition for merchant and issuer business in debit payments intensifies. The latest example comes from processor Fiserv Inc.’s Accel network, which says Walmart Inc. is using its service for signature-based debit card transactions. Walmart typically prompts customers paying with …

A series of partnerships with the card networks and now individual banks have positioned the online-checkout kingpin to make the leap to a mainstream digital-payments platform. Ever since PayPal Holdings Inc. was spun off from eBay Inc. in 2015, its chief executive, Dan Schulman, has not been shy about warning …

Suddenly, person-to-person payments services are gaining utility beyond just paying a person via a smart phone. What gives? So you thought these newfangled person-to-person payment services were meant only to replace cash with smart-phone apps that enable individuals to send and receive money electronically? Think again. All of a sudden, …

For all the hype lately, the digital currency remains a niche opportunity for independent sales organizations and other third-party acquirers. On the eve of the 76th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Valve Corp. dropped a little bomb of its own. The Bellevue, Wash.-based parent of Steam, a marketer of popular online …

The first Bitcoin futures contracts began trading at 6 p.m. Eastern Time Sunday and almost right away the volume of activity crashed a Web site operated by the exchange, Cboe Global Markets Inc. After an initial run up, Bitcoin was trading around $16,500 by 10 a.m. Monday. A rival exchange, …

Whether he intended to or not, Ken Chenault may well have touched off a debate about what constitutes the ideal governance structure for a global payments network. Chenault, who will retire early next year as chairman and chief executive of American Express Co., charged this week that his two big …

Discover Financial Services could find itself in the catbird’s seat if Apple Inc.’s new Apple Pay Cash person-to-person payment service gains popularity as a way to pay merchants. In addition to its main P2P function, Apple Pay Cash is accepted at any merchant location that accepts Apple’s 3-year-old Apple Pay …

Mastercard’s decision to remove the  signature requirement comes as authentication  measures improve in the payments industry.  But what comes next is still a huge question. As unique as signatures are, their value as a way of authenticating a credit or debit card transaction has long passed, a realization many consumers …

The United States seems to excel at developing new electronic payment systems, but it struggles with commercializing them. Oh yes, debit card payments are nearly universal now, but if you were following this business back in the ‘80s, when networks, banks, and merchants were looking at the matter of ATM …