Why Is First Data Dissing PayPal POS? Discover Financial Services has recruited 50 merchant acquirers to bring acceptance of leading online payment system PayPal to more than 2 million physical merchant locations by year’s end. Still holding out, at least as late as late May, was No. 1 merchant processor …

Mitchell Cobrin Americans like a sure thing, which is not proving helpful when it comes to figuring out chip card deployment. Better to identify promising markets, like m-commerce, and recruit partners with expertise. EMV technology, or the point-of-sale payment protocol based on Europe’s Europay-MasterCard-Visa card system, has arrived on U.S. …

Selling small businesses on mobile payments is an exercise in frustration, but signs of a breakthrough are appearing where the benefits are most obvious—restaurants, says Rick Berry. There is a lingering perception among the smaller business owners that mobile is out of their reach, too expensive, and too complicated to …

A plan to expand its footprint in mobile payments by offering white-label applications to merchants is quickly paying dividends for LevelUp, the mobile-payments unit of Boston-based SCVNGR Inc. Washington D.C.-based Sweetgreen, a 17-location chain of organic salad shops, has become the first LevelUp merchant to roll out a branded mobile-payment …

  Google Inc. released a trio of announcements on Wednesday concerning its Google Wallet mobile-payments application, but even taken together these did not add up to the major overhaul of the product that Google promised last fall. Google’s news included: a Wallet-based person-to-person payments service that works with Gmail, Google’s …

Mobile dominates this year’s Guide, as you’d expect, but so does the urge toward faster payments. Neither trend is going away any time soon. The obvious theme running through alternative payments nowadays is the predominance of mobile. Processors, solutions vendors, and startups alike are scrambling to make it possible to …

  One full year after complete implementation of the controversial Durbin Amendment’s debit card regulations, the impact on both merchants and consumers—the law’s putative beneficiaries—remains mixed, according to a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. While Durbin drastically reduced interchange for the country’s largest banks while …

  n In the case of some merchants, a high rate of PIN acceptance is already controlling fraud, the merchants said. “Our actual fraud rate is so small it’s hardly worth mentioning,” said Gavin Waugh, vice president and assistant treasurer at Wendy’s International Inc. “[EMV] doesn’t move the needle that …

  In one of the stranger twists arising from the controversial settlement to credit card interchange litigation, the federal judge overseeing the massive case on Thursday gave lawyers for two feuding merchant groups a week to propose changes to a Web site that urges merchants to opt out of the …

Karen Epper Hoffman It’s been 18 months since the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect. Who is benefitting the most from the first government intervention into card-acceptance pricing? A year-and-a-half after the Durbin Amendment’s debit card interchange cap took effect, the radical legislation that created the cap remains …