Gasoline retailer Cumberland Farms, which operates nearly 600 stores in eight Northeastern states, is proving you don’t have to sell fancy coffee concoctions to generate impressive results with a mobile app. The program, which Cumberland calls SmartPay, enrolled 100,000 customers in the first 45 days after its 2013 launch—a response …

Security Notes When we detect air pollution, is the treatment of asthma our first line of defense? When our water supply is contaminated, is it our best answer to boil our water? It is difficult to keep our air and water clean, but that’s our strategic aim, meeting the threat …

Hoping for contactless chip cards? Not likely any time soon. The contact version of EMV is emerging as the clear issuer choice as October’s liability shift approaches. Here’s why. It’s show time for chip cards. With the payment card networks’ so-called liability shift now just eight months away, U.S. general-purpose …

A flood of payments initiatives has come out of the Valley, with more on the way. What is it about this business that gets the mercury rising out there? Where do people in payments look for innovation? Yes, some of it shows up in Boston, a little in Chicago and …

The United States with its several thousand credit and debit card issuers and more than a dozen payment networks presents a stiff challenge to the card industry as it tries to convert from magnetic-stripe stripe cards to Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards, two industry veterans told a group of independent sales …

The Gimlet Eye While we were putting together this month’s cover package observing the sixth anniversary of Bitcoin, it struck me that this bête noir of banking shares something in common with that other upstart in digital payments, Apple Pay. Yes, they are different in nearly every respect. For consumers, …

Cover Story By John Stewart Putting the Silk Road and Mt. Gox disasters behind it, the Bitcoin train is picking up speed. But what’s the real destination? If you want to get an idea of how far Bitcoin has come, take a look at what people are buying with it. At …

Once perceived as a payment method for drug dealers and shady merchants craving anonymity, the Bitcoin virtual currency is now accepted at approximately 75,000 merchants worldwide, and their numbers are growing fast, according to a new report by First Annapolis Consulting Inc. Even so, it will be a while before …

The Gimlet EyeWhen Apple Inc. unveiled its Apple Pay mobile-payments service in September, and again when the service went live in October, the hype surrounding the new product—coupled with its fast uptake—put us in mind of another highly anticipated payments launch that took place almost 25 years ago. It, too, …

Strategies By John Stewart Thanks to new players, new tech, and new data sources, access to funding has never been so plentiful for small but growing merchants. The payments industry often celebrates small merchants as the breeding ground of transaction growth. After all, as they start up, they offer new …