Rumors from the past few years that Amazon.com Inc. was building a smart phone bore fruit Wednesday when the online retailer revealed the Amazon Fire, a mobile device built to ease the mobile commerce experience on its Web site. It may herald another way to shop Amazon, but it …

By Jim Daly In what’s shaping up to be a very busy year in the vibrant world of electronic bill payments, financial-management software provider Intuit Inc. on Tuesday announced plans to buy online and mobile bill-pay services provider Check Inc. for $360 million. Rumored for about a month, the deal …

The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, which last summer announced its effort to tokenize payment card numbers, is now mulling a related system that would similarly mask sensitive consumer information related to automated clearing house transactions, and may have a proposal ready by year’s end. “It’s something we’ve spent a …

Merchants that think payment services should leverage software, be simple to integrate, carry low or no fees, and include digital-currency choices have a champion in PayStand, a startup that emerged Tuesday from private beta with $1 million in funding and a promise of no transaction fees for online sellers. The …

Peter Lucas Merchant aggregators are leading the charge to simplify merchant on-boarding and add value to payment technology. Can traditional ISOs catch up? It’s only been a few years since Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. relaxed their rules to officially recognize merchant aggregation, but in that short time the aggregator …

Once known for mainly hiring sales people, the most innovative ISOs nowadays are on a hiring binge for techies. What’s behind this shift? By Kevin Woodward and Jim Daly \”Disruptor” is one of the favorite nouns in American business nowadays, so much so that it’s almost a cliché. But the …

The merchant-acquiring industry might soon get another publicly traded company should independent sales organization Mercury Payment Systems Inc. follow through on plans to sell a minority stake in the company. n Mercury Payment Systems Inc.’s operating subsidiary, Mercury Payment Systems LLC, currently is 62% owned by an affiliate of private-equity …

Merchants are starting to accept the fast-rising digital currency, including big names like Overstock.com. But for now Bitcoin’s volatility and other issues may outweigh its advantages for merchants and acquirers. By Peter Lucas “In response to Bitcoin’s rise in popularity around the world, Zynga, with help from BitPay, is testing …

Plastic: High Growth, High Risk More than ever, plastic dominates the business of electronic payments in the United States, with two-thirds of all noncash transactions in 2012 occurring on a card, up substantially from 60% just three years earlier. That’s according to the Federal Reserve System’s triennial payments study, released …

Peter Lucas They’re not household names, but network backbone providers TNS and Phoenix Managed Networks have executed a major shift beyond their long-time base in dial-up connections. Ask a merchant who his or her transaction processor or acquiring bank is and they can provide the name in a snap. Ask …