Visa Inc.’s U.S. payment card issuers had about 48 million EMV chip cards in the market as of Dec. 31, a Visa executive said Wednesday. And, somewhat surprisingly, about 80% of the small number of U.S. EMV transactions today are coming from small merchants rather than big retailers, which are …

By Jim Daly A California independent sales organization called CardFlex Inc. and its two principals have settled federal charges that they allegedly processed more than $26 million in unauthorized charges for a company known as I Works. CardFlex strongly denied the FTC's charges and said it settled in order to …

Mobile point-of-sale service developer CardFlight Inc. will make an EMV chip card-compatible mobile POS reader available in the second quarter, in anticipation of the Oct. 1 liability shift. That’s the date card fraud at the point of sale is scheduled to shift to the party least prepared for it. The …

A near-doubling of attempted wire-transfer fraud and strong corporate support for the chip-and-PIN variety of EMV card payments are among the highlights of the latest payments-fraud study from the Association for Financial Professionals. The recently released study by the Bethesda, Md.-based AFP, an association of corporate treasury managers and finance …

Merchants face relentless and ever-changing attempts to make fraudulent online transactions, but measuring the effectiveness of rules in place to counter those attempts takes time. Now, CyberSource, a unit of Visa Inc., is offering a service called Decision Manager Replay that lets merchants test various anti-fraud measures for online transactions …

  Merchants looking for a way to secure e-commerce and mobile-commerce transactions made with credit and debit cards have a new option with the debut of an update to Acculynk Inc.’s PaySecure service. The Acculynk technology allows consumers to make PIN-based transactions on their PCs and mobile devices. The Atlanta-based …

Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment system has taken some hits over rumors of rampant fraud. According to some reports, Apple Pay fraud is 60% higher than mag-stripe credit card fraud. And now, with the announcement two weeks ago of the Apple Watch and its support of Apple Pay, there is …

Online-payments provider Skrill Group has a new owner. United Kingdom-based Optimal Payments Plc is buying London-based Skrill for 1.1 billion euros (U.S. $1.2 billion), Optimal announced Monday. Both companies provide digital-wallet services, with Skrill specializing in wallets for online-gambling users, e-commerce and money transfers. Skrill also offers a payment gateway and …

The U.S. payments industry is counting on EMV chip cards to eliminate much if not all of the counterfeit and lost-and-stolen fraud merchants suffer at the point of sale. They may well do that when EMV is fully deployed, but is it likely that rising e-commerce fraud will swamp any …

By Jim Daly Square Inc. on Monday introduced a business-oriented version of its Square Cash person-to-person payments service aimed at displacing checks. The merchant processor also unveiled so-called “$Cashtags,” which Square touts as a simple and fast way for people to get paid through Square Cash. Dubbed Cash Pro for …