With m-commerce shifting into high gear, consumers are expecting a faster, user-friendlier checkout experience. Delivering that kind of experience won’t come from advances in handset hardware, but software. by Peter Lucas In the world of mobile commerce less is more, especially when it comes to checkout. Savvy merchants learned years …

  n San Francisco-based Square posted a notice for a “Square U Representative” position last month on its Web site and has put out reminders about it this month through Twitter as well as a feature story about it on its Facebook page. The job posting indicates the position is …

Ever since Visa Inc. released a major policy statement in August regarding chip cards in the United States, observers have waited for the other shoe to fall from competing card networks, especially Visa’s biggest rival, MasterCard Inc. That void began to fill in late on Monday with MasterCard’s release of …

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The Shazam electronic funds transfer network on Wednesday announced it is making available across its network a mobile-payments service that lets stores, tradesmen, and other merchants accept PIN-debit transactions as well as credit and signature-debit payments. With the rollout, the service is available to nearly 1,500 member financial institutions and …

The banks’ defeat on the Durbin Amendment—followed by their hamhanded efforts to recover lost revenue with explicit debit card fees—may have done more than tarnish their image with consumers. It may also have damaged their ability to deploy revenue-generating programs linked to debit cards, according to Beth Robertson, director of …

Yet another big debit card issuer, TCF Financial Corp., weighed in with results from the first full quarter of Durbin Amendment debit card interchange price controls, and they weren’t pretty. The Wayzata, Minn.-based regional bank said on Tuesday that card revenue fell 51% to $13.6 million in the fourth quarter …

Payment processor Euronet Worldwide Inc. reported on Monday that part of its European businesses sustained a computer security breach late last year. The disclosure is of interest to the U.S. payments industry as it moves slowly toward adoption of EMV chip cards because most European cards have both a chip …

San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal Inc. later this week will expand its five-store point-of-sale payments pilot with Home Depot to 51 stores, chiefly in the San Francisco Bay area, according to John Donahoe, chief executive of eBay Inc., PayPal’s parent company, and interim president of PayPal. Speaking during a fourth-quarter conference …

PayPal Inc. on Wednesday projected its mobile-payments volume this year will reach $7 billion, nearly doubling the $4 billion it now says its mobile service processed in 2011. The final number for last year came in significantly higher than the $3.5 billion PayPal was estimating late in the year and …