The gift card, the bedrock of the prepaid card world, is increasingly taking on a digital form, cutting costs for merchants and adding to convenience for mobile-phone-wielding customers. But hold the obituaries for plastic. By Lauri Giesen One of the fastest-growing payment cards isn’t really a plastic card at all. …

Karen Epper Hoffman Mobile remote deposit capture and related services are creating a wealth of opportunities for imaging companies. What is market leader Mitek Systems doing to defend its position, and what do its challengers have cooking? Will success change mobile remote deposit capture? Services that allow consumers and businesses …

  It took less than two weeks for the Secure Remote Payment Council (SRPc), a consortium of U.S. electronic funds transfer networks, to reject MasterCard Inc.’s offer for EFT networks to use its proprietary Maestro application identifier (AID) to allow processors to route EMV debit transactions according to network choices …

  Thursday, Jan. 31, 2013, will go down as one of the payments industry’s more notable days of the deal. First, payments-software developer ACI Worldwide Inc. announced plans to buy Online Resources Corp. in a deal that values the electronic bill-payment and presentment technology provider at $263 million. Then the big processor …

  The effort to bring near-real-time person-to-person payments to the customers of smaller financial institutions took another step on Wednesday with the announcement the Sprig digital-wallet service from Co-Op Financial Services, a processor and network operator that links some 3,000 credit unions. The new service, available for both mobile devices …

First Data Corp. late on Monday named Ed Labry, president of the big processor’s North American unit, as interim chief executive officer to  replace current chief executive Jonathan J. Judge, who is retiring early for health reasons. The announcement came less than a day before First Data announced mixed fourth-quarter …

  Intuit Inc. on Monday acquired the assets of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Payvment Inc., a 3-year-old vendor of shopping-cart and payment tools for merchants operating on social networks. Terms of the deal, which capped a series of developments that for some observers cast doubt on the market for so-called social …

Mobile bill payments took a step forward Thursday when automated clearing house network overseer NACHA reported that its Council for Electronic Billing and Payment (CEBP) had developed final guidelines for consumers to use Quick Response (QR) codes on bills to facilitate electronic payments. The guidelines are voluntary for billers, banks …

The surcharging provisions of the credit card interchange settlement announced last July will take effect on Sunday, but observers expect few merchants will take advantage of their new-found freedom to add a surcharge to Visa and MasterCard credit card sales. “I know of nobody” who plans to surcharge, says Mitch …

U.S. consumers are rapidly turning to mobile devices to pay bills, and that trend in turn is likely to encourage more card usage for bill payment and more electronic bill presentment, according to a study released this week. Some 8% of households with an Internet connection paid at least one …