Security Notes Its roots are old and its practice common: Whether gift cards, concert tickets, or a retainer paid to your lawyer, the idea of paying ahead of receiving the intended merchandise, or the agreed-upon service, is implemented with great versatility. What drives this practice? The service provider surely loves …

Funding for small businesses has been an increasingly important source of revenue for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but they’re not the only parties that have noticed the market’s lucrative potential. Now, banking-technology vendors and even large merchants are getting into the game. Jack Henry & Associates Inc., …

For all the talk about merchant adoption and wallet creation, Bitcoin hasn’t found a consumer market—and probably won’t, says Nathalie Reinelt. Bitcoin isn’t really disrupting anything until it starts pulling large volumes of assets away from traditional financial institutions. That’s not likely to happen any time soon. Only days into …

Traffic on the automated clearing house network continues to climb at a steady clip as financial institutions and other users of the system mull over a proposal to speed up payments from next-day to same-day settlement. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, the latest period for which data are available, …

A flood of payments initiatives has come out of the Valley, with more on the way. What is it about this business that gets the mercury rising out there? Where do people in payments look for innovation? Yes, some of it shows up in Boston, a little in Chicago and …

In the wake of an important Supreme Court decision early last week, Visa Inc.’s chief executive Thursday afternoon sounded a conciliatory note on the company’s often fraught relations with merchants and touted Visa’s digital-payments initiatives as a way of bringing more value to retailers in return for the fees they …

The National Football League’s Dallas Cowboys organization is lending its name recognition to a new merchant-services company, Blue Star Payment Solutions. Frisco, Texas-based Blue Star intends to build its brand based on its affiliation with the Dallas Cowboys as one of the companies owned by the Jones family, says Jerry …

Traffic on the automated clearing house network continues to climb at a steady clip as financial institutions and other users of the system mull over a proposal to speed up payments from next-day to same-day settlement. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, overall volume on the ACH grew 4.15% year …

Financial institutions, processors, and regulators have been moving toward systems that speed up electronic payments, but ironically their success in replacing paper checks with electronic processing may undermine their efforts. That’s because image exchange, the process by which paper checks are replaced by electronic images for clearing, has driven down …

Payments 3.0 This issue inaugurates the Payments 3.0 Fearless Forecast. The expectations discussed here represent a distillation of insights gathered from banks, merchants, card schemes, startups, regulators, and consumers, distilled by 30 years of seeing new payments systems come and go. Apple Pay: 2015 will be the year for Apple …