Qualcomm Inc.'s $210 million cash deal for Firethorn Holdings Inc., announced on Wednesday, is expected to accelerate Firethorn's movement toward mobile payments and hands Qualcomm a significant stake in the rapidly developing markets for both banking and payments via handsets, according to Tripp Rackley, chief executive of Atlanta-based Firethorn. “All …

AT&T Inc., which on Tuesday announced it is launching a nationwide mobile-banking service, expects to have 500,000 mobile phones preloaded with the software necessary for the service by the end of the year and 10 million handsets so equipped by the close of 2008, according to a senior executive with …

Lack of consumer awareness regarding contactless transaction technology ranks as a leading concern among retailers and may ultimately impede development of contactless payments based on mobile phones, research released this week indicates. Yet most merchants that have adopted contactless programs don't promote those programs to their customers, according to the …

Mobile-banking and payments application developer Firethorn Holdings LLC scored a coup this week when Verizon Wireless, the nation's No. 2 mobile-phone carrier, announced it had picked Firethorn as a strategic partner for mobile banking and would preload Firethorn's system onto newly issued phones. The agreement means the nation's two largest …

Cellular South expects to launch some time in the first quarter what would almost certainly be the first commercial application of near-field communication (NFC) technology for point-of-sale payment, and also the first driven by a wireless carrier rather than a payment network. The plan follows a three-month, two-city pilot in …

Data Insecurity Part 5 While absolute dollars of fraud are rising with volume, the payments industry has done a commendable job in managing risk. For every $100 in purchases with signature-based credit cards, only about a nickel winds up as fraud?about one-third what it was 15 years ago?and that rate …

At a time when companies as big and diverse as Google Inc., eBay Inc.'s PayPal, the bank card networks and others are all moving into mobile banking and payments, a regional bank in Mississippi has emerged as one of the more experienced players in the embryonic market. Tupelo-based BancorpSouth Inc. …

Data Insecurity Part 4 Securing transactions at the point of sale seems like child's play compared to the Internet, and since the payments volume is 20 to 25 times the size of online transacting, a natural venue for improved data security. But the rash of data breaches (covered in Part …

Merchants often grumble about the costs and hassles of accepting payment cards, but rarely do they go on strike in protest. But that's what some New York City taxicab drivers started doing on Wednesday, though their gripes involve more than just cards. According to late-morning wire-service accounts, an unknown number …

Though still in its infancy, mobile banking will balloon from 1.68 million to 34.9 million users over the next four years, laying the groundwork for mobile payment channels such as physical-world transactions via near-field communication (NFC) and mobile commerce, a new report argues. Already, report author Nick Holland, a senior …