Many small merchants have no clue about EMV, and among those that do, many are unpersuaded. Here are some ideas to overcome those—and many other—hurdles before and after the liability shift. Inertia can work with you or against you. When it comes to persuading smaller merchants to adopt EMV-compatible …

Getting mobile payments to click with merchants and consumers will require new models for digital marketing. And doing it right will take lots of money and time. (Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part examination of the current landscape for mobile payments. Part One, which sized up …

Upstarts armed with digital technology are rewiring the money-transfer business, but the time-tested agent model enjoys key advantages. The old and new just might meet in the middle. In some respects, agent-based money-transfer providers are like what cash and checks were to an earlier generation of credit and debit card …

The federal government now expects processors to be payments cops, says Andy Phillips, chief executive of an ISO that found out the hard way. Following the networks’ rules is no guarantee the government will think you’ve done enough. In the new world of payment processing, I’m now a cop. I …

MasterCard Inc. on Tuesday launched a person-to-person payment service in the United States that will allow debit card holders to send money to any other individual with a debit card account, regardless of the card brand and with the money arriving nearly instantaneously. The new service, dubbed MasterCard Send, also …

Payments 3.0 A good working definition of short-circuiting something is “to force the termination of a process before its conclusion by bypassing one or more steps.” Short-circuiting also usually blows up the bypassed mechanism. Established industries operate on mutually agreed-upon principles and rules. But when the rules become over-protective of …

These days, the payments business is all about mobile innovation. But, as ever, it’s also about adoption. How many of these players will crack that nut? If anything rules in the payments business, it’s adoption—the ability of a new payment service to win usage by consumers and uptake by merchants. …

Big Data is all very well, but when it comes to automated underwriting for merchant funding, the key is to know which data streams to include and which to ignore, says David Rubin. We believe that not every Internet itch that a merchant scratches is germane to the ability or …

Security Notes Shopping is an emotional experience. Shops lure us, play us, and make us shop and pay against any and all rationality. Only now, technology is about to redress that imbalance. The biggest impact will be felt by ordinary commodities. No one gets overly excited about buying eggs or …

By Jim Daly Tests of alternative payments and smart-phone apps are in the cards for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. The Bureau has excised more than 90% of the paper from its payments processes but still must traverse a difficult “last mile” to become a nearly …