By John Stewart While big-time companies like Apple Inc., Google Inc., and Samsung Electronics Co. prepare to battle it out for control of mobile payments, evidence is emerging that consumers may be strongly inclined to reward merchants that accept mobile wallets and punish those that don’t. Some 30% of consumers …

With the pressure on to secure the digital fortifications of payment data, security professionals say they need more money, more time, and more knowledgeable staff to defend their companies, according to a survey from data-security company Trustwave. In its 2015 Security Pressures Report, of the more than 1,000 security professionals …

Mobile point-of-sale company AnywhereCommerce will add near-field communications (NFC) payment capability to its mobile hardware in coming weeks, signaling a further shift along its path to becoming a cloud-based payments gateway. That’s the word from William Nichols, Anywhere Commerce’s chief executive. That strategy, implemented about six months ago when Nichols …

Merchants that have spent years battling card-acceptance fees are turning a jaundiced eye toward a proposal to speed up payments on the nation’s automated clearing house network. That’s because the same-day settlement proposal, floated in December by NACHA, the ACH’s rules-setting organization, contains a so-called interbank fee that, for some …

By Jim Daly Another sign that the U.S. EMV conversion has a long way to go emerged last week when a survey of more than 990 independent business owners by Newtek Business Services Inc. revealed that 71% of respondents were unaware of the so-called EMV liability shift coming on Oct. …

Familiar is easier than unfamiliar. This basic truth explains much misspent effort in the payments world. Wallets are familiar. We all have them. So as it became clear that the physical part of payments—cash, checks, plastic cards—would at some point disappear, it was natural to carry the idea of a …

Apple Inc. chief executive Tim Cook said Monday that nearly 700,000 U.S. merchant locations now accept the Apple Pay mobile-payment service, compared with the 220,000 locations reported to have accepted the service when it launched last October. Since Apple Pay relies on near-field communication (NFC) contactless technology to enable Apple’s iPhone …

Payments and other financial-services executives have long complained about what they call patent trolls, typically individuals who gain a patent on what some regard as a longstanding business method and then sue practitioners for infringement. In some instances, these cases have succeeded in wringing large settlements out of banks and …

Online-commerce company Shopify Inc. has made its Shopify POS app free for its merchants and introduced an iPhone version of the payments service, the company recently announced. The app, which launched in 2013, includes a card reader. The new app replaces the Accept Payment option in Shopify Mobile, the Ottawa, Ontario-based company’s …

Ever since its launch, proponents of Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payments service have touted the wallet’s high-tech security features, including tokenization of card credentials, a secure element in the phone locking down those credentials, and fingerprint authentication. But now, only four months after that much-heralded launch, banks that support Apple …