Mobile Wallets

Zach Harvey says it’s too hard to get Bitcoins, so next month his new company will start shipping its first machines intended to let ordinary consumers exchange cash for the controversial digital currency. The company, Lamassu Inc., is billing the tabletop device as “the world’s first Bitcoin ATM” and says …

The Isis smart-phone-based payments machine is finally getting in gear, observers say, in the wake of several recent developments involving the service that is jointly owned by three big mobile-telecommunications carriers. Giant card issuer JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Monday said that several of its cards will support the Isis …

Nearly a year after announcing itself, Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) took another step toward achieving its goal of developing a cutting-edge mobile-payments system with the appointment of Dekkers L. Davidson as chief executive. Thursday’s announcement of Davidson, former managing director at credit card issuer Barclaycard U.S., as CEO comes hard …

Nine months after the Isis mobile wallet launched in Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, usage among small merchants appears to be sporadic at best, despite considerable fanfare and promotion at the launch. But some of the factors blamed by merchants contacted by Digital Transactions News have little to do …

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …

Fearing that security worries could hinder mobile payments and other digital-payments channels, a handful of major banks are building a server-based switch that will mask consumers’ banking information when they perform transactions. Tentatively called Secure Cloud, the so-called thin switch is under construction at The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, …

While more and more consumers are using mobile devices to access e-commerce sites, few small merchants have made their sites easy to navigate and buy from, according to research released this week. Indeed, mobile optimization—making sure a site loads quickly and renders checkout forms that are easy to read and …

Lackluster adoption has prompted a major research firm to make a sharp downward revision of its five-year projection for mobile payments based on near-field communication (NFC) technology. Worldwide NFC payments volume will reach $22 billion by 2016, down 40% from the original forecast released a year ago, says Gartner Inc. …

A plan to expand its footprint in mobile payments by offering white-label applications to merchants is quickly paying dividends for LevelUp, the mobile-payments unit of Boston-based SCVNGR Inc. Washington D.C.-based Sweetgreen, a 17-location chain of organic salad shops, has become the first LevelUp merchant to roll out a branded mobile-payment …

  Google Inc. released a trio of announcements on Wednesday concerning its Google Wallet mobile-payments application, but even taken together these did not add up to the major overhaul of the product that Google promised last fall. Google’s news included: a Wallet-based person-to-person payments service that works with Gmail, Google’s …