By John Stewart At least some consumers in Columbus, Ohio, are using the Merchant Customer Exchange’s CurrentC mobile-payments app, but with little or no advertising so far finding a store cashier who knows about the app and how it works is a hit-or-miss proposition. That’s the finding of a CurrentC …

By John Stewart When Nikki Baird and Steve Rowen evaluated retailers’ digital gift cards this year, the thing that surprised them the most was how disjointed the shopper experience is. Card sales that worked just fine at a merchant’s desktop site just didn’t translate well to a mobile device, for …

Security Notes It has long been established that something as simple and ordinary as our handwriting exposes our character traits, and may determine whether we receive a job offer or not. But it has only recently been established that something as simple and ordinary as our payment record exposes the …

Payments 3.0 The rate of adoption of in-store mobile-phone-based payments is a critical issue facing merchants. How best to respond to it is a complex problem with some major unknowns. Recent studies indicate that nearly half of consumers would prefer to use their own mobile device when shopping in a …

By Kevin Woodward The complexity and multiple configurations of POS systems have some merchants and vendors mired in delays. As the U.S. payment card industry hurtles toward its EMV destiny on Oct. 1, the process for certifying EMV-compliant point-of-sale terminals is moving along well, albeit with one exception. That exception …

Making mobile POS work seamlessly for merchants of all sizes is a daunting job, one best tackled by partnering with multiple specialists, says Paul Rasori. A recent IHL report projects significant growth in the tablet point-of-sale market through 2019, upwards of a 27% compound annual growth rate. To those of …

  PayPal Holdings Inc. is jumping into the free personalized person-to-person payments game with the launch of PayPal.Me. Announced Tuesday, PayPal.Me enables consumers to create personalized permanent links to share with others. When clicked, the links then present a Web page for senders to select the amount and the payment …

While a seemingly unending rash of data breaches has payments players scrambling to adopt a panoply of fraud-fighting technologies, little attention has been focused on the consequences for issuers and merchants when cardholders are wrongly turned down at the point of sale because of fraud suspicions. It’s a big problem—bigger …

A variant of a skimming device called a “shimmer,” which steals EMV chip card data, has been found on an ATM in Mexico, raising security questions as the United States converts to the EMV standard. The shimmer incident was first disclosed Tuesday by security reporter Brian Krebs of the KrebsOnSecurity …

By John Stewart When First Data Corp. last month formally let the world know it intends to make an initial public offering of stock, the massive processor said it plans to use the IPO’s proceeds to reduce its big debt load. Some experts said this could free up capital so …