Consumer affinity for shopping on smart phones and tablets is unlikely to abate any time soon. And that poses a problem for retailers as they try to make the payment experience easier on mobile commerce sites and apps. It’s a problem that credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. and payments-and-authentication-services provider …

Some 43% of businesses report they were exposed to card fraud in 2013, a whopping rise of 14 percentage points from 2012, according to the latest annual fraud survey from the Association of Financial Professionals. Nonetheless, survey respondents are remarkably optimistic about the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard, with 92% …

Payments industry professionals attending one of the four regional acquiring conferences can expect to see more from the Electronic Transactions Association at the events. n “This is a conscious effort on the part of the ETA to participate, support them, and engage in mutually beneficial activities,” Oxman tells Digital Transactions …

Merchants that think payment services should leverage software, be simple to integrate, carry low or no fees, and include digital-currency choices have a champion in PayStand, a startup that emerged Tuesday from private beta with $1 million in funding and a promise of no transaction fees for online sellers. The …

Two banks that sued Target Corp. and data-security services provider Trustwave Holdings Inc. in the wake of Target’s massive data breach have withdrawn their federal lawsuit after filing it only a week ago, leaving payments-industry observers wondering why they brought the action in the first place. In separate motions filed …

E-commerce retailers have a unique advantage over their brick-and-mortar counterparts. They typically know quite a bit about a shopper’s purchasing habits, and that helps them create personalized offers that bring back customers to spend more. Index, a San Francisco-based company, hopes to give large brick-and-mortar retailers a tool to enable …

  Debit network NYCE says it will use Visa Inc.’s common application identifier technology on chip debit cards, marking yet another regional debit network’s acceptance of a critical component to enabling Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card acceptance in the United States. This is NYCE’s first formal EMV license, says Fidelity National Information …

When the payments industry broke out with a rash of data breaches in December, pundits and politicians were quick to blame technical factors such as the deliberate pace at which the industry is adopting chip cards. Why hasn’t the U.S. replaced its mag stripes with EMV chips, the cry went …

Online Alternatives Go Mainstream With millions of people now using PayPal, Amazon Payments, Google Wallet, and other so-called online alternative payments, observers are starting to say that the term is rapidly becoming outmoded. In a February report, Javelin Strategy & Research says eight in 10 online shoppers used an online …

Jim Daly Despite the growing acceptance of pot in some states, the legal marijuana industry has a tough time getting payment-card processing and other banking services. When, if ever, will the smoke clear? Could a multibillion-dollar new merchant market be going up in smoke because of a conflict between state …