The bubbling person-to-person payments market boiled over Wednesday when mega banks Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. announced a joint P2P service dubbed clearXchange. While currently limited to the banks’ customers, clearXchange could be integrated with other P2P systems, and possibly even become …

With the traditional lines between e-commerce and the point of sale blurring, a Boston-based startup on Tuesday introduced a mobile wallet that lets consumers shop at multiple stores, both brick-and-mortar and online, and skip past checkout lines. AisleBuyer LLC’s app, which works on iPhones and handsets running Google Inc.’s Android …

  After taking a nasty hit in the recession, credit cards are back on their feet, though somewhat wobbly. Figures from First Data Corp., the largest U.S merchant processor, show that credit card usage is sustaining growth after returning to positive territory in early 2010. Data from the bank card …

Marketing via social-network tools, long thought to be a feature primarily of e-commerce, is rapidly moving to the physical point of sale as merchants seek new ways to generate sales and independent sales organizations look for ways to differentiate themselves. This move to the point of sale, meanwhile, has been …

n Visa Inc. announced on Wednesday a digital wallet aimed at increasing its share of transactions in mobile payments, e-commerce, and at the point of sale. n The digital wallet will store all the payment cards in a consumer’s wallet, including non-Visa branded cards, Jim McCarthy, Visa's head of global …

The hype still abounds, but mobile payments and banking seem to be taking some concrete steps this week toward wider adoption. –Mitek Systems Inc., the leading developer of software for mobile remote deposit capture, on Monday announced that five of the nation’s 10 largest retail banks now use its flagship …

At least some banks and merchants may be forging ahead into chip card payments, but presentations at an industry trade show this week leave doubt whether the rest of the industry is ready to follow. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has now enabled all of its U.S. stores with terminals to accept …

The telecommunications companies that own the Isis mobile-payments joint venture have apparently given up on the idea of creating their own merchant network and instead are redirecting their efforts on a mobile wallet, according to a published report. If confirmed, the Isis move means that the existing payment card networks …

Merchant groups on Monday sought to assure Congress that they won't reject small debit card issuers' cards once the so-called Durbin Amendment makes large issuers' debit cards much cheaper to accept. “If merchants didn't accept the card, they would risk losing the sale and losing the customer; a risk very …

Probably no pathway in electronic payments is more littered with the wreckage of failed processors than that of micropayments. But recent moves by publishers to charge for content is helping fuel renewed interest in the business of processing tiny transactions. Google Inc., for example, has developed a micropayments engine to help …