In an effort to free up cash to rebuild its struggling business, payment processor First Data Corp. will stop funding its 24,000 employees’ retirement plans with cash and instead provide stock grants to all employees. New First Data chief executive Frank Bisignano announced the change Monday in a memo to …

As mobile-payments strategists struggle with clunky checkouts that lead to abandoned sales, a startup based in Albuquerque, N.M., is seeing dramatic early success with a 3-month-old solution that allows consumers to buy products from e-mail messages with a pair of clicks. The company, @Pay LLC, has signed up more than …

Biometric authentication will be in widespread use by financial institutions and online merchants by 2015, a payments-security expert predicts. “We’re at the threshold, it’s going to be common in the next year or so,” Al Pascual, a senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. Pascual forecasts …

Nearly 90% of U.S. point-of-sale terminals will be ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by 2017, according to a new Aite Group LLC study. The report examines the reterminalization of card-acceptance locations triggered by the payment card networks’ plans announced in 2011 and 2012 to wean America off of …

The payments industry may have solved a vexing problem related to EMV chip cards and the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment, but whether that solution will smooth the way for EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa) deployment in the United States is less clear. The EMV Migration Forum, an industry group that has been working …

Payments executives already know the coming changeover from magnetic-stripe cards to chip cards using the Europay-Visa-MasterCard (EMV) standard will be expensive—about $11 billion, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC. But Aite notes that while likely to greatly reduce fraud at the point of sale, the big switcheroo …

Sometimes news developments turn certain types of merchants into public-relations and political hot potatoes for their payment processors, forcing merchant acquirers to decide whether they want to continue serving them. Despite strong sales, firearms merchants are one such category today, thanks to several mass shootings in the past two years, …

No sooner had Charlie Scharf taken over at Visa Inc. than he was making nice to retailers. The new chief executive, surveying a history of frayed relations between card networks and merchants, spoke at Visa’s Investor Day conference early last month about building new bridges between the two camps. He …

Settlement? What Settlement? Who said the proposed settlement of a massive court case involving interchange unveiled in July 2012 would put to rest the decades-old dispute between merchants and the bank card networks over card-acceptance costs? Beginning just before Memorial Day, partisans filed three interchange-related lawsuits in less than a …

Elizabeth Whalen So far, usage of so-called open-fare payment systems is low, and now transit agencies will confront new problems implementing them. As the hardware for accepting payments on public-transportation systems in many cities nears obsolescence, transit authorities are planning upgrades that allow riders to pay fares with something they …