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 …

With a pair of U.S patents in hand, a small, Montreal-based engineering firm may have placed itself in a position to strongly influence the fast-growing market for mobile card acceptance. The patents, awarded last month to AnywhereCommerce, cover payments via a dongle connected to a mobile device’s audio jack, a …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@AGSgo.com In his startling 2011 book, “The Currency Wars,” James Rickards reports on financial war games conducted by the Pentagon in which our national security leaders increasingly recognize an emerging, unaddressed area of vulnerability. This vulnerability meanders through arcane Wall Street methodologies, cuts through full-blown cyber terrorism, …

Peter Lucas Despite backing from some of the country’s biggest carriers and tech firms, NFC-based mobile wallets are struggling to win acceptance with merchants and consumers alike. Does the solution lie in the cloud? It’s been tough sledding of late for digital wallets based on near-field communication (NFC), the contactless …

Lauri Giesen The big retail growth is online and in mobile commerce, but ISOs looking to crack this market must be willing to clear some high technological and operational hurdles. During times of overall sluggish retail sales and low profit margins on basic payment services, many independent sales organizations might …

Jim Daly Can the old Hypercom Corp.’s reborn U.S. operation make a go of it with a new name, new owner, and new products in a fast-changing POS terminal market? After 15 months in the Makeover Department, the U.S. operation of the former Hypercom Corp., now known as Equinox Payments …

Karen Epper Hoffman Mobile-commerce developers are finding more ways for shoppers to make purchases without ever leaving the application. But will this approach outpace the mobile Web? As smart phones and tablet computers grow in processing power, screen clarity, and ubiquity, the question of whether people will buy goods and …

New PIN-debit business as a result of the Durbin Amendment continued to lift MasterCard Inc.’s transaction volume in the third quarter, though the No. 2 card network’s top executives warned on Wednesday that the big growth is likely to slow down. Meanwhile, MasterCard is turning its attention to juicing up …

Calling it a “sophisticated criminal effort,” Barnes & Noble Inc. on Wednesday reported tampering occurred on PIN pads at 63 of its stores in nine states. The company on Sept. 14 disconnected every PIN pad in all of its nearly 700 stores but indicated that in addition to personal identification …