New Jersey legislators last week passed a bill with overwhelming support to prevent businesses from banning consumers from using cash for purchases. The bill, which now goes to Gov. Phil Murphy for his signature, would make New Jersey only the second state to protect cash-using customers in stores. The proposed …

Want to start—or bet on—the next big thing in payments? Forget glitz and glamor and focus on startups that address pressing problems with substantial and realistic solutions, argues Eric Grover. Successful payments fintechs such as Adyen, Ant Financial, Klarna, Stripe, and Square have generated enormous excitement. With the arguable exception …

Benefitting from a built-in customer connection, retailer wallets adroitly tap into shoppers’ purchasing habits in ways unavailable to the big tech wallets. Retailer mobile wallets are proliferating in part because the consumer can get something that she can’t with any of the tech-based apps. That is a high degree of …

Unbridled enthusiasm for distributed ledgers has given way to a more sober assessment of the technology’s probable role in payments. A few years ago, evangelists for blockchain confidently predicted its widespread adoption to facilitate faster, more secure, and economical payment transactions.  The type of transaction didn’t matter. Whether it was …

Payment processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) last month unveiled a line of point-of-sale terminals and services for small and mid-size businesses, and took its Vital brand out of a 13-year retirement as the name for the new product suite. The cloud-based Vital POS has three major components: Vital Mobile, …

So far, Visa Inc. has dominated the headlines regarding the U.S. conversion to contactless payment cards. Mastercard Inc., however, will soon be getting into the act. “In the U.S., contactless momentum continues to grow on both issuing and acceptance sides,” Mastercard president and chief executive Ajay Banga said Thursday. “We …

A consortium of academics is betting it has the formula to create a high-performance blockchain network capable of processing payments faster and at greater scale than competing blockchain networks. The network, called Unit-e, is expected to process transactions confirmed by consensus on the blockchain in 15 seconds. If realized, the settlement …

Data-communications provider Transaction Network Services acquired R2G Services, a Chicago-based provider of a market-data and managed-hosting platform; terms were not disclosed. Payment processor Repay Holdings LLC, which private-equity firm Corsair Capital acquired in 2016, said it has a definitive merger agreement with Thunder Bridge Acquisition Ltd., a special-purpose acquisition firm …

The proposed merger of Fiserv Inc. and mega-processor First Data Corp. has huge implications for many parts of the payments industry. But the deal, if consummated as planned, could have an especially large effect on the U.S. debit card market. First Data owns the Star electronic funds network, while Fiserv …

TD Ameritrade announced individual investors can instantly fund a brokerage account using Apple Pay through Apple Business Chat. The capability means investors can use a debit card to deposit up to $10,000 per day via Apple Pay, though the limit may vary by bank. The service is much quicker than …