Visa Inc.’s announcement Friday that it will make signature authentication optional for EMV contact and contactless transactions in North America starting in April might provide another boost for merchants who have yet to adopt chip-card acceptance, suggests an analyst. Signatures remain a requirement for Visa magnetic stripe-based transactions not subject to …

Visa Inc. is joining the other three card brands in making signatures optional for many of its transactions beginning in April. The card brand, which had credit card volume of $499 billion and debit volume of $388 billion in its fourth quarter ended Sept. 30, says in a blog post published …

A ranking of retailers offering optimal mobile-shopping experiences in their stores places building materials retailer Lowe’s Companies Inc. atop the list, announced DMI, a mobile-retail specialist. Among the criteria Bethesda, Md.-based DMI, a unit of Digital Management LLC, evaluated in its “Mobile Maturity Model: 2018 Retail” report were pricing, inventory, …

Overall U.S holiday sales in 2017 grew 6.2% over 2016, a pace that bested 2016’s 4.7% sales-growth rate, First Data Corp. announced Wednesday in its latest SpendTrend report. Retail spending during the Oct. 28 to Jan. 1 period increased 5.4%, compared to a 3.6% growth rate in 2016. Measured at …

Say goodbye to Android Pay and Google Wallet, and say hello to Google Pay. Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit on Monday announced a rebranding of its disparate online payments services under the single moniker Google Pay. The new branding’s scope is so broad that even the function within Chrome Web browsers …

As technology firms, both within financial services and those entering it, take larger shares of banking revenue streams and become more like banks, financial institutions will beef up their tech investments as they attempt to counter this pressure, advises Aite Group LLC in a report on 2018 financial-services trends. In …

The PCI Security Standards Council named Lance J. Johnson to the executive director position. Johnson, who had been chief operating officer at Sequent Software Inc. for the past five years and spent 20 years at Visa Inc., replaces Stephen W. Orfei, the general manager who left earlier this year after …

The blockchain, mobile commerce, fraud, data breaches, and authentication were all hot payments topics in 2017. Expect that to continue into 2018 if the prognostications from several payments executives hold true. Much of their outlook centers on identity and authentication, especially as data breaches, large and small, continue to wreak …

E-commerce platform Magento Inc. announced Instant Purchase, its new one-click payment feature that is now standard on its Magento Commerce system. For merchants, Instant Purchase offers a customizable button, a mobile-optimized process that Campbell, Calif.-based Magento says can reduce time-to-purchase by 90%, automatic shipping to the shopper’s default address, and …

Santa Claus might be relaxing on Dec. 25, but criminals targeting online merchants with stolen credit and debit cards won’t be taking the day off. That’s evident from Stripe Inc.’s latest report on online fraud trends and behavior. Released this week, the report, which examines an undisclosed number of transactions made …