Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

PayPal’s bold new strategy for the physical point of sale faces daunting challenges that will require the young company to accept lower margins, work with ISOs, revamp systems, and chop transaction costs, says René M. Pelegero. Unfortunately, ISOs perceive PayPal as the enemy. Thus, PayPal needs to develop, and quickly …

  PayPal’s Triangulation Strategy   It was Visa Inc. that popularized “It’s Everywhere You Want To Be” as its slogan years ago, but these days it appears to be PayPal Inc. that’s living up to the old tagline.   First, the San Jose, Calif.-based eBay Inc. unit established itself as …

  Merchants that are tired of managing constant, disruptive software updates are likely to adopt Web-based software, which offers too many benefits to ignore and is more secure than you may think, argues Mike Townsend.   Web-based systems now cost less than many legacy systems, while also being more efficient …

Countless news reports have reported or speculated about what Google Inc., Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Facebook Inc. have done or might do in mobile payments. Consumers, however, don’t rate these four companies as highly as they do their own banks or traditional payment companies in trustworthiness involving their financial …

Historically, the payments industry has ignored the fact that not everyone who shops online has a credit or debit card. With a handful of startups providing cash processing for online transactions, that’s no longer the case. By Karen Epper Hoffman No matter how much credit and debit cards have come …

Despite a seemingly non-stop parade of headlines about data breaches last year, the number of credit and debit card records compromised actually fell, according to new figures from the Identity Theft Resource Center. The ITRC says it identified 111 data breaches that exposed 3.38 million records in 2011. n In …

Typically thought of as a mobile technology for physical merchants, NFC could soon be converting card-not-present transactions into card-present payments for e-commerce retailers. That prospect has important implications for processors and developers. By Bill Pittman Every e-commerce retailer would like to reduce its cost of payments, slash its fraud, and …

Apple may be the most talked-about tech company that has yet to make a definitive move in payments. Is there any fire under the smoke? By Lauri Giesen When payments executives discuss the up-and-coming players in their industry, the names of high-tech companies such as Google, Intuit, Square, PayPal, and …

The surging popularity of the smart phone has revived the digital wallet, and now Google, Visa, AmEx, the wireless carriers, and a wide assortment of other providers are jockeying for dominance in this nascent business. By Peter Lucas Still trying to make sense of the digital-wallet landscape? You\'re not alone. …