With more and more consumers getting accustomed to shopping online and on mobile devices, merchants are losing more and more sales to checkout abandonment. “Conversion rates aren’t where we’d like to see them,” said Joe Walent, a senior analyst at Mercator Advisory Group, a payments consultancy. Walent, who spoke Tuesday …

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Chase Pay mobile-payment service, announced in October, is on track for tests this summer with greater availability in the fourth quarter, according to Kim Fitzsimmons, head of global e-commerce and large omnichannel solutions at Chase Commerce Solutions. Fitzsimmons, who spoke Monday during a panel discussion at …

After eight months of experimentation in Columbus, Ohio, Merchant Customer Exchange LLC on Monday issued a statement from chief executive Brian Mooney announcing it is putting off a national rollout of its CurrentC mobile-payments service to an unspecified date. Mooney added that the Boston-based company, formed in 2012 by many …

Gift cards are the target of a crackdown in the first half of 2016. Next month, PayPal Holdings Inc. will no longer allow items equivalent to cash, including gift cards, to be covered by PayPal’s Seller Protection program for merchants. And prepaid card provider Blackhawk Network Holdings Inc. recently reported …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. sued Visa Inc. on Tuesday claiming that Visa is trying to make the retailer use signature verification for some EMV debit card transactions and route those transactions over Visa’s network rather than Wal-Mart’s preferred PIN-debit networks. The suit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, …

The direct carrier billing business has been consolidating for the last few years, and on Monday the latest deal confirmed that surviving players are still willing to pay for volume. London-based carrier biller Bango said it had acquired a major rival, Danal Inc.’s BilltoMobile service, from San Jose, Calif.-based Danal, …

Ouch. Merchant acquirer Square Inc. reported after Thursday’s market close that payment volume grew 45% year over year in the first quarter to $10.3 billion, but the company’s stock still fell 22% on Friday. Despite the strong payments growth, investors didn’t like a number of things they saw in San …

For merchants these days, laying hands on a payment terminal with the needed EMV certifications is hard enough. Finding a certified device with built-in intelligence is even harder. Against that backdrop, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup called Poynt Co. on Thursday announced its Poynt Smart Terminal is the first such …

BitPay Inc. made its name signing up merchants to accept the bitcoin digital currency, and now it’s adding a reloadable Visa prepaid card to its consumer-facing products. The card will enable users to make purchases at the millions of Visa-accepting merchants as well as the relative handful that accept bitcoin, …

While the payments industry has been buzzing lately with talk about the blockchain, Bitcoin has been reaching pricing levels it hasn’t seen in more than a year. The rally comes amid fresh optimism for a solution to a vexing capacity problem and for the blockchain itself, the distributed ledger that …