Gideon Samid • gideon@bitmint.com Last month, millions of people found themselves in distress as they struggled to bounce back from the massive knockout blow dealt them by superstorm Sandy. Gas stations, even if they had generators for their pumps, could not operate their card-payment systems, and long lines were formed …

Jim Daly The Royal Canadian Mint held a first-of-its-kind competition this year to spawn ideas for virtual cash. Could some of these ideas solve the problem of the high cost of low-value electronic payments? From Silicon Valley to India, almost the entire world is bubbling with new ideas for electronic …

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 …