Jane Adler Facing pricing pressures from new competitors in their traditional business, the wire-transfer companies are seeking new growth opportunities. New technology is highly disruptive to established markets, and the payments business is no exception. Consider recent developments in the traditional wire-transfer business. As technology and consumer demand change the …

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 …

Last month came word of what appears to be a potent new prepaid card offering from American Express Co. Dubbed Bluebird and offered through Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the card runs on AmEx’s new Serve transaction platform and eschews many of the pesky fees other prepaid cards levy on consumers. No …

With its core daily-deal market getting crowded, market leader Groupon Inc. recently made two moves that position the company as a rival of independent sales organizations, value-added resellers, PayPal Inc., and others trolling for mobile-payments transactions from small merchants. In October, Chicago-based Groupon rolled out its Breadcrumb service, a point-of-sale …

It’s time for bankers to stop looking at mobile technology merely as a cost cutter and start using it to make money, said speakers at a retail-banking technology conference on Tuesday. Banks that add a variety of new services to their mobile offerings ranging from in-store bar-code scanning to expedited …

Once the bright stars in the financial world’s firmament, online banking and bill pay are no longer growing for banks and other financial institutions and will likely see only incremental growth over the next five years, a new report projects. Unless financial institutions can ignite growth again, they will drift …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@AGSgo.com It looked strange some years ago when a known underworld figure became conspicuously inactive transaction-wise, offering the FBI very little to investigate. This oddity, along with several others, continued for some time until the mystery was solved. It turned out that his trade was going on …

Google Inc. may have just overhauled its nearly year-old mobile wallet, but it still appears to have plenty of plans for the near future of the product. For example, the Web giant is looking at adding a person-to-person payment capability and allowing users to save credentials other than payment cards, …

Point-to-point encryption of card data has been a hot sell for merchant processors and vendors of security technology ever since the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) took effect in 2006 and especially after a spate of high-profile data breaches at merchants and processors not long afterward. Visa Inc., the …

Cybercriminals have introduced a new version of a notorious malware threat that is not only harder to detect but also more capable of stealing card numbers, PINs, and other sensitive information. This latest variant of the so-called Zeus Trojan malware includes a change that makes it virtually invisible to programs …