Two dominant payments companies—Visa Inc. and VeriFone Systems Inc.—are teaming up to better secure the varying ways consumers shop across digital and face-to-face channels. Announced Wednesday, the deal lets San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone, which makes point-of-sale hardware and security products, gain access to Visa’s CyberSource platform that global merchants use …

The Gimlet Eye Last month, in a little essay called “So, Where’s the User?” we asked a question that’s often overlooked in all the sound and fury over mobile payments: Will the consumer ever show up in appreciable numbers to use a mobile device for payment, particularly at the physical …

Everybody remembers the Durbin Amendment’s caps on debit card interchange. But the law also sought to help merchants by increasing competition for debit card traffic. It did this with a transaction-routing requirement, which has been in effect now for three years and mandates that merchants have a choice of at …

With Google Inc.’s announcement of Android Pay Thursday, the first major direct rival to Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay came into focus. While other Apple Pay competitors are already in the market or soon will be—handset giant Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and the retailer-controlled Merchant Customer Exchange LLC are expected to …

Carrying out business as usual is becoming harder to do as the payments business tries to adapt to new technologies. Asked at a recent San Francisco conference about what are the most disruptive trends in payments, 40% of industry professionals and alternative-finance executives polled cited the proliferation of mobile-wallet use …

Merchants, whether they sell online or in stores, consistently have one bugaboo about their payment-processing service: They want it to be cheaper. Online retailers, in particular, which pay higher card-not-present interchange rates, can use some simple practices to make a dent in these costs, as outlined this week in a …

By John Stewart Left for dead as recently as two years ago, the concept of mobile payments in physical stores is staging a remarkable resurrection. The signs are everywhere. In April, PayPal Inc. said it will adopt near-field communication (NFC) after years of mocking the technology, which enables wave-and-pay transactions …

Consumers expect restaurants to be the top merchant type to adopt mobile payments, especially as they envision it simplifying the payment process. That’s the finding of a survey from independent sales organization Harbortouch Payments LLC, which also products point-of-sale products for restaurants and other merchants. In the survey of 1,000 …

  It’s no secret that one cool use of smart phones and tablet computers is the ability to use apps. Research firm eMarketer Inc. predicts that 93% of U.S. smart-phone users will download and install at least one app in 2015, and 90% of tablet users will, too. It’s also …

Few doubt the tremendous growth in mobile payments as consumers increasingly wield their mobile phones at the point of sale. In fact, consumers spent approximately $4 billion doing just that in 2014, a marked increase from the $961 million in 2013, says the “Mobile Proximity Payments Forecast 2015,” a new …