David Heun

The payments industry has come a long way with how it treats loyalty and rewards. Here are some of the more creative offerings to come about this year.

Same-day Automated Clearing House transactions exist, in part, as a first step in the faster payments initiatives taking place in the U.S. But are they lucrative enough for acquirers to add to their portfolio?

The simplest scams are sometimes the hardest to thwart. Rather than redesign its prepaid card with added security, InComm is redesigning the packaging in a way that should render stolen cards unusable.

Increasingly, the acquiring and ISO business has taken the view that advances in technology that originally looked like threats instead made it easier to sell more products and support more payment types. But this opportunity won't last forever.

Bay Dynamics and Symantec are working together to better protect payments and personal data from insider threats.

Payments services provider Worldline has agreed to acquire the Digital River World Payments unit of Digital River Inc. to bolster its online payments offerings to large merchant clients.

Credit card or personal data transactions getting processed through IBM equipment will soon benefit from "one-click" data encryption in a powerful new mainframe.

Seeing a need for virtual and legacy payments worlds to better connect, Push Payments and partner linked2pay developed a real-time payments system that can function as that connective tissue.

If nothing else, no one could ever accuse U.K. regulators of taking a hands-off approach to the country's payments operations.

If U.S. consumers are taking a cautious approach in adopting new payments and security technology, they at least are becoming keenly aware of the options available now and in the near future.

Payments technology provider Cardtek and partner Axis Bank have launched a national open-loop payment system featuring a contactless card for public transportation and other purchases in India.

Millennials -- a demographic credit unions badly want to capture -- are using P-to-P services to pay for drugs and gambling, and while CUs may not want their members paying for illegal activities with account-connected services, a growing number of institutions also want to be the FI of choice for legal drug businesses.

American Express is adding virtual account numbers to its business travel account service, saying it will provide businesses with more visibility and control of employee travel expenses.

Mobile and online P-to-P services may be the popular, mainstream payments service of choice for young people who don't prefer cash, but it also has a seedy underbelly, according to new survey data.

North American Bancard Holdings has completed its acquisition of Total Merchant Services, a merger that NAB says will make it the seventh largest processor in North America in terms of merchant locations.

Some merchants, issuers and processors are concerned that the card brands will tout their "ownership" of payment card prefixes as a basis for requesting that mobile transactions on their cards be routed to their networks and screened through tokenization services they provide.

PayPal is launching a cross-border trade service to help small and mid-sized businesses in the U.S. improve their international presence and sales.

N26 will soon add insurance service to go along with its mobile payments, and credit and savings accounts.

Mobile QuickPass NFC payments are accepted at nearly a half million point-of-sale terminals outside of China, and QuickPass QR code payments have been available in Hong Kong and Singapore for about a month.

Consumers have accepted the use of fingerprint authentication for mobile payments. But will they be as welcoming of facial recognition? A few companies are testing the waters.