We list 37 entries this year, of which only three appeared in our original Guide nine years ago. This year’s Field Guide represents our 10th annual effort to catalog the broad currents in electronic payments by listing some of the more salient players providing alternatives to the big network brands. …

General-purpose mobile wallets have yet to convince most merchants and consumers that they have real value. Can that change, and if so, when? The hype over mobile wallets hasn’t ceased ever since Google Checkout launched way back in 2006, and it’s only become louder since Apple Inc. unveiled Apple Pay …

Zippy’s Restaurants said credit and debit card data, including cardholder names and numbers, may have been compromised in a “data-security incident” at its approximately two dozen locations in Hawaii between last Nov. 23 and March 29; the chain learned of the incident March 9. The Western Union Co. has added …

Bitcoin is far from a mainstream payment method, but most merchants that accept the cryptocurrency are online sellers. On Monday, the Atlanta-based processor BitPay Inc. announced an update intended to bring Bitcoin and its recently hatched cousin, Bitcoin Cash, to more brick-and-mortar merchants. BitPay introduced its Checkout app, which works …

Ready, a company specializing in self-pay software for restaurants, has teamed with Squirrel POS, a supplier of point-of-sale software to the same industry, to allow customers to view, split, and pay their tab on their mobile phones. Automatic Laundry, which provides laundry-management services for multitenant buildings, announced the LaundryConnect Pay …

LevelUp announced 25 more restaurant companies as clients of its mobile-ordering and -payment app. These include national brands Smoothie King and Zaxby’s. ParTech Inc., a vendor of point-of-sale software to the restaurant and retail industries, launched PAR Pay, an EMV-capable processing solution for credit, debit, and stored-value cards. ParTech is …

Data breaches at restaurants and hotels are nothing new, but a just-out report from Verizon Communications Inc. shows how extensively the hospitality industry gets hit by hackers. New York City-based Verizon, which besides telecommunications has a large business in investigating data breaches, says in its latest annual breach study that …

Wave-and-pay flopped when issuers tried it 10 years ago with mag-stripe cards. Now it’s staging a comeback with EMV and mobile payments. The sequel just might be better than the original, but showtime is uncertain. After years of false starts and overenthusiastic hopes, the U.S. just might be about to connect …

Amazon.com Inc.’s interest in launching a checking-account-like product, reported last month by The Wall Street Journal, could have deep roots in its strategy both for payments in general and for Amazon Pay, the payment wallet it operates for non-Amazon sites, expert observers say. Talks between the Seattle-based retailing colossus and …

Glance Pay, a mobile-payment service that had only been available in Canada, is now available for U.S. consumers and merchants, Glance Technologies Inc. announced Wednesday. Vancouver, British Columbia-based Glance says Glance Pay is accepted at 14 merchant locations, ranging from restaurants and food trucks to salons and service providers, across …