Our Guide spotlights how mobile payments and digital currency drive payments innovation. by John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Kevin Woodward Alternative payment schemes are becoming almost too numerous to count. A few months back, one payments-industry veteran listed all the mobile wallets he knew of and came up with about …

Sequent Software Inc. on Tuesday launched a solution that will let card issuers take advantage of so-called host card emulation, a protocol that allows issuers to provision digital cards for mobile payments while bypassing the phone-based secure element. With the new solution, issuers will also be able to embed their …

  An industry as intrinsic to commerce as electronic payments is unlikely to make wholesale moves to new technologies like mobile payments. That applies to consumers, too, who appear to be moderating their use of mobile payments. Data from the IDC Financial Insights 2014 Consumer Payments Survey reveal that consumer …

A less costly, software-based way to handle mobile transactions using near-field communication (NFC) technology is expected to begin fueling NFC payments later this year following the release of specifications from both MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. n Support from the two major international card networks comes as demand for HCE-based …

  Selling merchants solely on the price and availability of a diverse set of payment processing methods won’t be enough in the next year or so as merchants increasingly turn to those who can help them grow their businesses. That’s the message proponents of mobile marketing and advertising services are …

PayByPhone Technologies Inc., which runs mobile-payment programs for parking in half a dozen U.S. cities, is looking for ways to serve relevant offers to users of its system, a top executive with the company said Thursday. n The offers, for example, could include discounts at stores or restaurants near where …

  Loop, a mobile wallet that uses a case or fob to generate its own contactless field to communicate with many payment terminals, has launched for the latest iPhone models. The brainchild of payments veterans George Wallner, founder of point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp., now Equinox Payments LLC, and Will …

A form of near-field communication that does not require a secure element to complete a mobile payment now has the formal backing of card brands MasterCard Inc. and Visa Inc. Each of them announced today their respective contactless payment schemes support so-called host card emulation. Host card emulation got a …

Mobile point-of-sale payment provider Apriva marked $9.55 billion in transactions through its payment gateway in 2013, a 17.3% increase from $8.14 billion in 2012, fueled by growth in mobile payment acceptance, cashless vending, and its gateway service. Mobile POS payments, in particular, saw exceptional growth in 2013 versus 2012. Apriva …

As you’ve no doubt noticed, the huge data breach at Target Corp. has triggered an equally impressive avalanche of commentary about whether the baneful effects of such crimes might have been mitigated had Target, and the rest of the country, converted to EMV by now. The presumption here is that, …