Peter Lucas They’re not household names, but network backbone providers TNS and Phoenix Managed Networks have executed a major shift beyond their long-time base in dial-up connections. Ask a merchant who his or her transaction processor or acquiring bank is and they can provide the name in a snap. Ask …

Tom Donlea Though separated by many differences, large and small merchants share a common problem: insufficient data to help decide whether to approve an online transaction. Here’s one way to fix that. The rapid growth of e-commerce has truly revolutionized consumer behavior. Businesses now have a broader reach to a …

If you think NFC is the future of in-store mobile payments, think again. NFC is a technology, not a solution. The idea that mobile payments should replicate the old card-payment model is all wrong, says Rick Oglesby. Rick Oglesby is a senior analyst at Aite Group LLC, Boston. Reach him …

Visa Inc. chief executive Charles Scharf on Thursday quelled rumors that the payment network might change its October 2015 liability-shift deadline for Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card transactions. Scharf also decried what he called “misinformation” and “confusion” about card security following December’s news of Target Corp.’s huge payment card data breach and …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@BitMint.com The three awfully young programmers intercepted me on my way to class, asking if BitMint can do micropayments. They explained that they have developed a smart-map application that colors urban streets according to crime statistics at any given hour of the day. The idea is to …

A Look Back And a Provocative Look Ahead Welcome to an anniversary party— one played out not in a ballroom or country-club drawing room but in pages of cold print. The milestone we are marking is our 10th anniversary of publishing Digital Transactions, an enterprise we rather immodestly think of …

We couldn’t recruit David Letterman to help us with this article, but what follows are the Top 10 U.S. payments events of 2013 as identified by the Retail Payments Risk Forum, a research and industry-dialogue unit at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. 10. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized …

Jim Daly With PCI 3.0, the PCI Council hopes merchants will come to regard data security as “business as usual” rather than just an annoying annual ritual. Here are just a few of the things you’ll find in the new Version 3.0 of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI): …

There will be no “one wallet to rule them all.” The phone itself is the new mobile wallet, not any one app. Mobile wallets are more about marketing than about payments, and a white-label approach will let banks and merchants keep control of the vital customer data they need, says …

Might the Bitcoin digital currency be heading toward legitimacy among skeptical regulators and law-enforcement officials? Testimony at a U.S. Senate committee hearing Monday indicated that government may be ready to make peace with Bitcoin and, by extension, other new digital forms of payment, though if and when these new systems …