David Heun

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) is asking the Merchant Customer Exchange to explain why Apple Pay and other Near Field Communication-based payment systems were prohibited in some MCX stores shortly after the Apple wallet's 2014 launch.

To eliminate its fraud-prone MoneyPak reload cards, Green Dot introduced a swipe-to-reload system last year that seemed more streamlined but added a new requirement — the customer had to have the card present to top it up with cash.

Demonstrating that its contactless payments technology can serve other purposes, Powa Technologies will provide its PowaTag to Vodafone customers in the U.K. as a way to add minutes to their phone plans.

E-commerce payment service provider Payfort has begun offering its merchant clients in Arab countries support for monthly payment plans.

With regulatory scrutiny from the Card Act of 2009 and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, various prepaid and gift card products have come and gone in recent years. InComm's Vanilla Gift Card is not one of them.

Even though it is still the very early days of mobile payment wearables, consumer use of the devices is poised to reach a transaction volume at $501.1 billion by 2020.

More than a third of small-business owners won't accept EMV chip cards by Oct. 1 — and don't plan to do so any time in the future – but they may change their minds if the decision costs them as little as $100 in fraud losses.

Capify, a New York-based global alternative financing company, has landed a partnership with e-commerce giant Alibaba to provide cash advances and loans to small and mid-sized businesses in Australia.

Nearly a year to the date since he left his role as CEO of NetSpend, Dan Henry may have found the new "aha moment in payments" he said he would seek as the next chapter in his career.

American Express' OptBlue program has added 700,000 small merchants in the past 14 months, wooed by the promise of better fees for Amex acceptance. But it's still too early to declare the program a success.

When a country migrates to EMV chip cards to improve its security, the fraudsters will move to another channel, but not necessarily another nation.

Even if shoppers of Amazon.com's Prime Day event — advertised as better than Black Friday — found more to mock than to buy, the promotion last week marked the acceleration of an "on-demand economy" that other retailers can no longer ignore.

Apple executives didn’t flaunt Apple Pay transaction numbers or Apple Watch sales figures during a July 21 third-quarter earnings call, but they did provide some measure of merchant acceptance of the growing mobile payment system.

As more point of sale terminals include connections to the Internet and customers' mobile devices, payment companies may need to consider themselves in an "Internet of Things" environment — with all of the risks that implies.

Despite the doomsday predictions for banks and acquirers five years ago, the Durbin amendment hasn’t dramatically shaken up the business models of the payments industry.

Independent sales organizations are facing an age-old question that has confronted teenagers for centuries: What are they going to do with their future?

Apriva and Globalcom Engineering will partner to provide EMV hardware to various U.S. markets with unattended payments acceptance devices.

The regulatory landscape has become far more complex for acquirers and independent sales organizations, mainly because federal agencies are showing more interest in the various layers of the payments ecosystem.

With the clock ticking for the Oct. 1 deadline for EMV adoption, acquirers and independent sales organizations have a clear opportunity to become payments consultants.

Nacha, the electronic payments association, is starting an accelerated push to help corporations and financial institutions incorporate the ISO 20022 messaging standard — a key element of moving forward with a faster payments initiative in the U.S.