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 …

The expense of managing multiple upgrades to fleets of ATMs has small banks and credit unions turning to companies like Houston-based Dolphin Debit for help. Dolphin Debit, which manages more than 1,000 ATMs for more than 200 financial institutions and at several Murphy USA locations in 10 states, says its …

With Apple Inc.’s record results in the fourth quarter, the computer giant appears to be closing in on long-time rival Samsung for dominance in the crucial worldwide smart-phone market. Meanwhile, Samsung is working to catch up with Apple Pay, the highly publicized mobile-payments service Apple launched in October. For now, …

The private sector often lives in fear of government regulation, but the payment card industry’s indigenous regulators are piling on new disclosure, monitoring and security requirements for merchant acquirers, panelists said Wednesday at the Northeast Acquirers Association (NEAA) annual conference in Boston. While many of the new rules are meant …

American Express Co. reported $182.5 billion in U.S. card-billed business in the fourth quarter, up 7.9% from $169.1 billion a year earlier, and discount-fee revenues increased 1.8% to $4.99 billion from $4.90 billion. The average worldwide discount rate, however, decreased three basis points to 2.45% of the sale. American Express …

Americans love to shop. Whether online, in a small mom-and-pop business, or at a big-box retailer, shoppers turned out in droves this past holiday season. From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday for example, online sales were up 12.6%–a record week–according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. For the holiday season overall, …

Some 400,000 small merchants now accept American Express Co. payment cards through the OptBlue program that AmEx announced nearly a year ago. OptBlue enables bank card merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations to offer AmEx acceptance to small businesses and set the pricing through a one-stop-shopping option when they sell …

The United States with its several thousand credit and debit card issuers and more than a dozen payment networks presents a stiff challenge to the card industry as it tries to convert from magnetic-stripe stripe cards to Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards, two industry veterans told a group of independent sales …

By Jim Daly After a hiatus of more than three years, vending machines that get payment services through USA Technologies Inc. will soon be accepting MasterCard Inc.’s debit cards again as the result of an agreement between the two companies that USA Technologies announced Friday. Under the three-year agreement, “MasterCard …

PayPal Inc. updated its reader for its PayPal Here mobile point-of-sale service with Windows 8.1 support and separately plans to release software to integrate reader support into iOS and Android apps. Introduced in 2012, PayPal Here enables merchants to use their smart phones and tablets as payment-acceptance devices. The inclusion …