Can anything beat rewards as an inducement to get consumers to use mobile payments? Some experts say apps that let you skip the line might just do the trick. Mobile wallets are still relatively new technology, but the payments business has had enough experience with them to come to at …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Vantiv Inc.’s

A San Francisco analytics company with access to transaction data on 3 million consumer credit and debit cards says usage of Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment service rose steadily in 2016. TXN Solutions Inc. also says that among brick-and-mortar merchants Apple Pay usage is highest at New York City-area pharmacy …

By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews NCR Corp. on Tuesday unveiled a redesigned app for its NCR Silver iPad-based point-of-sale system that eliminates 33 taps from the transaction process and skips the home page in favor of a fly-out menu.

• Fifty-six percent of all bills in the U.S. are paid online at a biller, bank, or third-party site, according to data from ACI Worldwide and Aite Group. Of these, 72% are now paid at biller sites. • Digital-payments company Proxama PLC has agreed to provide payments services to clients of payment …

• Processing-software vendor Womply has launched an analytics tool called Retention Intelligence to help acquirers identify merchants likely to leave the portfolio. • A 2-year-old startup called diningData, which processes payments and analyzes data for restaurants, announced it is now handling $1 billion in annual volume. The company is a division of Hadfield …

It’s taken about a year, but Dwolla Inc. has now executed a strategic shift away from handling online and mobile transactions directly for consumers who want to pay merchants and each other. Instead, the 8-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based company now focuses on selling programming to clients that want to process …

• Independent sales organization Applied Merchant Systems announced it has increased its liquidity following  an expansion of its credit line with Goldman Sachs Specialty Lending Group and Business Development Corporation of America. In conjunction, Blue Square Resolutions, also an ISO, became a shareholder in the company. • Miami-based NovoPayments, which processes payments throughout …

Acquirers are starting to leverage the power of massive—and diverse—pools of information. The challenge lies in unlocking big data’s full potential. Big data has been a hot topic for years as companies look for innovative ways to become more competitive, boost customer retention, and raise their bottom line. Now merchant …

The National Retail Federation predicts consumers will spend $27.5 billion on gift cards this holiday season, up 5.8% from $26 billion in 2015. The increase follows the 18% plunge last year from $31.7 billion in 2014, which was the highest gift card spending total in at least seven years on NRF surveys. …