Open-fare payments for public transportation got a big boost when the Chicago Transit Authority announced it had awarded a $454 million, 12-year contract to Cubic Transportation Systems to build and maintain a payment system that accepts contactless cards. The CTA, which provides about 500 million rides a year, thus …

  We went out to San Francisco last month to take in X.commerce, a conference put on by eBay Inc. for its developer community. These are the people who, among other things, make payment applications work for the sellers, merchants, and processors that work with eBay and its payment entity, …

  The Concentrated World of ISOs   Reps from more than 1,200 independent sales organizations pound Main Streets, malls, and strip shopping centers in search of merchants interested in payment-processing services. That number suggests a wide-open industry, but a new study of ISOs sheds light on just how few players …

  By Peter Lucas   With transactions leveling off, independent ATM networks are gearing up to offer a host of new services aimed at the unbanked and the offers-obsessed.       Increasing ATM transaction volume is a tall order these days. Growth in total transaction volume has slowed to …

  What with the Durbin Amendment taking effect and serious moves in mobile payments, many observers had the feeling that the pace of change in e-payments quickened in 2011. But along with faster change come more problems. Herewith some of the most salient.   By Jim Daly and John Stewart …

  By Karen Epper Hoffman   A technique that allows consumers to capture card information with PC or mobile-phone cameras could make for faster, more secure transactions. Is anything wrong with this picture?       A picture may be worth a thousand words, but is a picture also the …

  By Karen Epper Hoffman   Next year may be the year of NFC. Then again, it may not be. In the meantime, a slew of startups have some alternatives to think about. Ever hear of Starbucks?       Near-field communication technology (NFC) may have taken a few strides …

Confirming other findings that payment card usage is picking up in the U.S., Visa Inc.’s credit and debit card dollar volume rose 9% in the network’s fourth fiscal 2011 quarter ended Sept. 30 to $516 billion from $474 billion a year earlier. Payment transactions increased 7.3% to 10.5 billion. Visa’s …

  More and more shoppers are turning to e-commerce, but online merchants’ payment practices leave them poorly positioned to exploit this trend for sales, according to a recently released report. Notably, the biggest online and multichannel retailers meet on average only 36% of criteria for payment options, according to Javelin …

  Many community bankers say their payment revenues are declining, and they are bracing for hits from higher expenses from complying with regulations and from fraud while at the same time trying to ramp up new services such as mobile payments. The findings come from the Independent Community Bankers of …