Radio Frequency Technology

Not every cog is in place yet, but payments from remote devices, especially so-called smart phones, are poised to grow from an estimated $389 million next year to $8.6 billion in 2014, according to a new report from Mercator Advisory Group. The report reviews the payments implications of new mobile …

A startup company called Bling Nation Ltd., which debuted this week, plans to combine contactless-payment technology with an on-us approach to debit transactions that it says will cut transaction costs for both community banks and merchants. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based processor is in discussions with five financial institutions and plans …

Nearly one-third of U.S. Bank customers who have been issued a contactless debit card have performed at least one contactless transaction since the bank's program began in June, an executive with the bank said on Wednesday. “So far, it's looking really promising,” Michael Shepard, group product manager for consumer credit …

MasterCard Inc. on Thursday announced a service it sees as a major step toward the ultimate commericialization of contactless payments via mobile phones. Intended primarily for the North American and European markets, the MasterCard Over-the-Air Provisioning Service is aimed at allowing any member issuer to readily personalize a handset for …

So-called stickers, or chip-and-antenna inlays that can be affixed to mobile phones or other tokens to turn them into contactless-payment devices, are showing signs of developing from a novelty to a commercial product. CPI Card Group, a card manufacturer in Littleton, Colo., expects to ship “several million” bank-card-branded payment stickers …

Results from a pilot in San Francisco involving multiple accounts on cell phones equipped with specialized contactless-payment capability show that consumers will readily adopt such technology as a form of wallet and as a way of accessing marketing content, says an executive with the processor involved in the pilot. In …

ATM surcharges often make the news when they hit a sensitive threshold such as $3, but the flip side of the story is the growth of options banks and credit unions offer customers to avoid paying the fees. According to newly released results from the Pulse electronic funds transfer network's …

A survey of about 100 mobile and broadband executives indicates the wireless bill is rapidly gaining support as a vehicle for handling payments for digital-content downloads to mobile devices in the U.S. But at the same time the executives expressed doubts about the prospects for payments via near-field communication (NFC) …

Lending took a bit out of travel-and-entertainment card leader American Express Co.'s second-quarter profits, but discount revenue still grew. Meanwhile, Fifth Third Processing Solutions outperformed its struggling parent company, and USA Technologies Inc. reported that transactions on its network of unattended machines more than doubled while sales of contactless card-reading …

International Merchant Services Inc., which has taken on all new senior management over the past 11 months, is launching a new marketing blitz this week whose underlying message might be characterized as impatience with the electronic transactions business. Hoping to accelerate the progress of promising payment technology that for a …