Mobile payments may be a nascent business fraught with uncertainty, but Starbucks Coffee Co. seems to have found a key to success. Last week, the company revealed that more than 3 million transactions have taken place on its smart-phone-based prepaid payments system, which became available in all U.S. company-owned stores …

Does EMV  Make Sense in the  United States? We pose the question above not because we are wondering about the answer, and still less because we doubt the benefits of chip-and-PIN security, but because a recent decision by Visa Inc. leaves us wondering what kind of future the world’s largest …

With $21.5 billion in assets, enough to rank it the second-largest credit union in the country, Raleigh, N.C.-based State Employees Credit Union will sustain a substantial loss of debit card interchange income when the Durbin Amendment to the Dodd Frank Act takes effect this summer. But that isn’t stopping the …

The prospect of combining on one contactless card payments for parking and transit fares would seem like a winner for hundreds of thousands of commuters who drive each morning to transit parking lots and then hop on a train or bus to the office. That was one idea floated last …

Visa Inc. on Wednesday said it will relieve merchants outside the U.S. of the requirement to validate compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) if the merchants process at least three-quarters of their Visa transactions from chip-enabled terminals. In a busy day at the world’s largest payments network, …

M-Commerce What NFC Should Look Like Steve Mott By most accounts, the wireless-carrier-based near-field communication (NFC) mobile payments initiative known as Isis (formally announced late last year but rumored for months before) is still falling short of the mark with respect to a winning formula for prying payments away from …

Cover Story Going for a Checkmate VeriFone’s buyout of Hypercom will further its dominance of America’s POS terminal industry, which is in the throes of rapid change. Is there life beyond the box? BY JIM DALY It’s not your father’s point-of-sale business any more. It’s not even your older brother’s. …

After about four years of testing, the New York City area’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is beginning the process of building a fare-payment system based on general-purpose contactless cards. MTA officials tell Digital Transactions News that they plan to publish a so-called Concept of Operations, a document outlining the agency’s broad …

Vancouver’s public-transportation authority has selected a $220 million fare-payment system from Cubic Transportation Systems Inc. that includes a transit-only reloadable contactless card but also the ability to accept general-purpose contactless cards. Replacing proprietary fare cards with systems that add transit capabilities to contactless credit and debit cards issued by banks …

Security An End to the Great Data-Storage DebatePeter Lucas Weaning merchants from their ingrained practice of storing payment card data won’t be easy, but security experts conclude it must be done. Meanwhile, encryption technology, though growing in popularity, is not invulnerable. Having survived database breaches at high-profile retailers and merchant …