Can anything beat rewards as an inducement to get consumers to use mobile payments? Some experts say apps that let you skip the line might just do the trick. Mobile wallets are still relatively new technology, but the payments business has had enough experience with them to come to at …

The financial-services industry is closer than you think to widespread adoption of biometric authentication, says Kirsty Tull. Here’s why. There is always that scene in action and spy movies. You know the one. In Mission: Impossible, they must defeat the facial-recognition system to access some secret data. James Bond’s gun …

It was only a matter of time before the 120-year-old automobile became a payments device. At the 2017 CES, a consumer electronics exhibition in Las Vegas, American Honda Motor Co. Inc. early last month demonstrated an in-vehicle payments system for parking and paying for fuel. Honda held the demonstration in …

A layman would have a hard time equating a ban on credit-card surcharges with repression of free speech, but that was the crux of the argument Jan. 10 between lawyers for merchants and the state of New York as they debated for about an hour before before the U.S. Supreme …

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Payments professionals who suspect fraud is getting significantly worse were confirmed in their suspicions Wednesday with a report indicating identity fraud hit an all-time high in 2016, affecting some 15.4 million U.S. consumers. That’s up nearly 18% from 2015 and represents a one-third increase from the …

Prepaid card specialist Green Dot Corp. has agreed to buy rival UniRush LLC in a deal valued at a minimum of $147 million and expected to close by the end of March. Pasadena, Calif.-based Green Dot, perhaps best known for managing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s MoneyCard operation, said the deal will …

• The U.S. Supreme Court seems divided over whether New York’s ban on credit card surcharges is a form of speech regulation as a group of merchants challenging the state’s anti-surcharge law assert, Reuters reported. The National Retail Federation said the case is about “being able to show the cost of using …

Founded in 1990 as the national trade group of independent sales organizations, the Electronic Transactions Association is taking on a decidedly technology-oriented hue as the payments industry rapidly evolves. The ETA announced last week that an Apple Inc. executive was elected to a two-year term on its board of directors, …

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews For the second time in less than two months, a major payments case is coming before the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, lawyers for merchants and the state of New York will argue before the eight justices over whether the state’s ban on credit card surcharges constitutes illegal …

Efforts to create unique identification markers for consumers across different merchants will be a challenge for many merchants this year, SIX Payment Services, the payment-processing arm of SIX, operator of Switzerland’s financial-market infrastructure, notes in a report released Wednesday. “Some payment-service providers are working on the idea of introducing a …