For all the hype lately, the digital currency remains a niche opportunity for independent sales organizations and other third-party acquirers. On the eve of the 76th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Valve Corp. dropped a little bomb of its own. The Bellevue, Wash.-based parent of Steam, a marketer of popular online …

Wider availability of technology that would have been nearly unthinkable only a few years ago is making biometric authentication a more likely replacement for the password. In the latest development, Discover Financial Services on Thursday announced users of its mobile app who own an iPhone X can log in to …

VeriFone Systems Inc. has finally shed its underperforming taxi business, but it still faces a North American market hampered by a three-year delay in an EMV deadline for U.S. petroleum marketers. The San Jose, Calif.-based point-of-sale company sold the taxi unit on Tuesday for $30 million. VeriFone, which will retain …

It’s been a busy year on the M&A front for merchant acquirers. What’s driving the deals, and what’s ahead in 2018? The year is coming to a close with nearly $14 billion in mergers and acquisitions either announced or completed in the merchant-acquiring industry. The number of deals could easily …

The price paid for the dazzling convenience of swipe-and-pay and thumb-and-buy is the monstrosity of backroom complexity. The convenience of Venmo, PayPal, and Square hides the growing dependence on layers on layers of protocols, equipment, and technologies. Indeed, the flipside of clicking out your banking needs on your phone is …

Much as cryptocurrency skeptics would like to set aside Bitcoin, the currency keeps intruding into the payments world. On Wednesday, Bitcoin began trading above $11,000, only a day after it sailed past the $10,000 mark and just three days after pushing past $9,000. But Bitcoin bullishness isn’t helping Square Inc. …

So far, nobody is making any money betting on Bitcoin to crash. The digital currency on Sunday soared past the $9,000 mark just five days after hitting $8,000 for the first time, and the $10,000 level could be in sight as early as later Monday, according to Coindesk, an online …

E-commerce platform BigCommerce Pty Ltd. announced a new app for its client merchants that allows them to offer customers credit, access working capital, and glean marketing insights through PayPal Holdings Inc.’s services. BigCommerce clients using the service will be able to include a standalone PayPal Credit button on their e-commerce …

Visa Inc. announced Monday that it has created a business unit dedicated to transit payments. The new unit debuts as public transportation agencies worldwide move away from cash and proprietary magnetic-stripe fare cards and begin accepting mobile wallets and contactless general-purpose credit and debit cards. Dubbed Visa Global Transit Solutions, …

Our daunting set of sticky wickets this time ranges from data breaches that just don’t stop to debit card pitfalls to travails for P2P and Bitcoin. This is Digital Transactions magazine’s 11th annual ranking of payments woes, and one lesson we’ve learned in all that time is that they don’t …