A number of daunting challenges face the U.S. payments industry as it sets out to make speedier transactions available everywhere in the country within three years, according to a report released this week by Aite Group, a Boston-based consulting firm. Among these challenges are the absence of an industrywide mandate …

This third and final installment of the Faster Payments series examines some ways the payments industry can get to “yes” on viable solutions—and thereby actually make some progress in making payments more secure and efficient as well as faster.  The Fed will have an indispensable role in fostering paths to …

Part I of this three-part series outlined the development of the realization by the Fed’s payments task forces that payments are complicated, difficult, and expensive to change in order to make them safer and more efficient.  This installment deals with the growing concern about security threats that are shaping the …

This article is the first installment of a three-part series this week on what the Federal Reserve’s Faster Payment Initiative means to the payment economy in the U.S., and how the payments ecosystem might get to “yes” on fixing what’s broken and deploying what’s possible. This part deals with the …

As the sweeping plan to update the U.S. automated clearing house network and other parts of the country’s payments system—an initiative known as faster payments—draws nearer, the first hints of what it could mean for merchants are being discussed. The faster-payments project, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve, will …

If creating faster-payment systems is like putting pieces of a puzzle together, another piece was added Wednesday when payment technology provider ACI Worldwide Inc. announced that processor Jack Henry & Associates Inc. will use ACI’s UP Immediate Payments service to connect its community-bank and credit-union clients to the new real-time …

The nascent faster-payments space is still working to tie together fractured payment networks and overcome interoperability issues that make it difficult for most SMBs to take advantage of the touted benefits. As businesses continuously seek new ways to improve efficiency and reduce costs, many companies large and small are working …

Payments Canada, operator of three major payment systems in that country, issued a five-point plan Thursday to put Canada on a path toward faster and more efficient electronic payments. The plan has many similarities with efforts by Canada’s southern neighbor to modernize payments, but also some differences, according to a …

By Kevin Woodward @DTPaymentNews More U.S consumers are using mobile peer-to-peer payments than are using a smart phone to make a point-of-sale purchase, research firm eMarketer Inc. says in a research note. While only 19.4% of consumers made a mobile payment in a store in the preceding six months, 24.9% …

Confirming months of speculation, MasterCard Inc. announced Thursday that it has a definitive deal to acquire VocaLink Holdings Ltd., operator of the United Kingdom’s automated clearing house and faster-payments systems, for £700 million, or approximately $920 million, in cash. London-based VocaLink operates BACS, the U.K.’s ACH network, as well as the …