David Heun

From gold plating to silicon guts, the plastic card is not what it used to be. Here are some of the most ambitious attempts to make credit and debit cards relevant in a high-tech world.

Four months after partnering with linked2pay's Bank Centric Payments platform, ICBA Bancard says it will support real-time posting of payments for community banks and their small business customers.

A popular person-to-person payments app in Italy is getting the backing of Intesa Sanpaolo Bank to become an option at the point of sale in more than 150 retail stores in Milan, Rome and Turin.

Apple Pay will make its debut in Denmark, Finland, Sweden and the United Arab Emirates before the end of the year, the company revealed during its third-quarter earnings call.

As a large furniture retailer in South Florida, City Furniture had to decide whether to move quickly to upgrade terminals and avoid the October 2015 EMV chip card liability shift, or stay on track with a process it was already engaged in for a mobile point of sale system in its showrooms.

One of the critical unanswered questions early in the Single Euro Payments Area process and the new Payment Services Directive in Europe was whether banks would pony up for needed technology upgrades.

American Express and MineralTree are partnering to streamline business-to-business payments by incorporating the Amex virtual corporate card platform into MineralTree's accounts payable processes.

Shopify is working to encourage more physical sales for merchants that don't have physical stores.

Visa is developing its first international transaction processing centers — one in the U.K. and one in Singapore — on the heels of other moves to accelerate digital payments growth globally.

Many companies in the payments industry position themselves as the answer to the competitive threat of Amazon. But that's not the only option out there.

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.