Lauri Giesen Many in the payments industry fault value-added resellers for lax data security, an accusation VARs resent. What’s the real story, and how are VARs working to make their products more secure? Most retailers and their merchant acquirers and third-party processors take careful measures to assure that fraudsters can’t …

Look for the real-time payments revolution to start in an unlikely place, the long-derided world of P2P payments, says Steve Mott. Payment networks are seemingly locked in the physical world. They expect compensation and eschew risk as if P2P or any real-time debit mechanism will behave like plastic cards. Steve …

Fewer than two months after a competitor announced a similar deal, wireless payments provider Apriva Inc. this week reported that it would continue offering pre-Durbin Amendment discounted acceptance pricing on Visa cards to vending-machine operators. Debit card interchange in late 2011 became a major concern for vending-machine operators and other …

By Todd Ablowitz If you’ve attended any acquirers’ conferences, tuned into industry news, or followed payments trends this past year, you’ve surely noticed a common topic: “Should we beware of Square?” Square has created quite a stir by growing in just three years from a Silicon Valley startup to a …

Already a major player in the prepaid card industry, U.S. Bancorp on Tuesday announced plans to bolster that part of its payment card business by acquiring FSV Payment Services, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based prepaid card program manager and processor. Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank issues prepaid cards for more than 4 million account …

With the fabled Cyber Monday shopping frenzy under way, Visa Inc. launched an authentication tool for online transactions intended to cut fraud while reducing the risk of shopping-cart abandonment. The tool, which Visa calls its Consumer Authentication Service, can be deployed by any Visa issuer starting on Monday. The network …

Total System Services Inc.’s announcement late last week that it has agreed to buy ProPay Inc. is the latest chapter in TSYS’s strategy of bulking up its position in the merchant-acquiring business through acquisitions. The deal will also hand the Columbus, Ga.-based processor a key stake in the rapidly growing …

While some transit agencies are in the process of implementing or mulling fare systems that will accept general-purpose contactless chip cards, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority and vendor Masabi US Ltd. on Monday rolled out a smart-phone ticketing app for Boston commuter-rail passengers that requires no big capital investment in …

Closed-loop gift cards can expect to see an increase of more than 5% in holiday load volume over 2011’s loads, according to a new forecast from Mercator Advisory Group Inc., which researches the prepaid card industry. Mercator predicts loads on closed-loop gift cards will hit $43.2 billion from Nov. 1 …

Three months after announcing their partnership, mobile-payments provider Square Inc. and coffee king Starbucks Corp. said Starbucks customers could now use the Square Wallet for purchases at 7,000 company-operated U.S. locations. The purchase process at Starbucks will be a bit different for users of the consumer-facing Square Wallet, formerly known …