Kate Fitzgerald

For merchants still on the fence about whether to buy Square Inc.’s $49 contactless card reader, there’s a new enticement to consider: Square has sped up the time it takes to accept EMV cards by 1.5 seconds.

Germany-based financial powerhouses Wirecard Group and Commerzbank have teamed up to launch a new financing service enabling online merchants to receive immediate credit for e-commerce sales, rather than waiting days or weeks for transactions to clear.

Walmart's new pact with JPMorgan Chase is anything but routine. From the perspective of Walmart, this deal hands it a long-desired holy grail: less expensive Visa transactions.

Bashas' Inc., Arizona's largest independent grocery chain, was certain it was prepared for the October 2015 EMV liability shift. After all, it had begun purchasing terminals for all of its 1,400 checkout lanes a year in advance.

San Antonio-based Frost Bank this week became the 11th financial institution to join Early Warning’s real-time payments network, which will continue to operate under the clearXchange brand at least through the end of this year.

Fiserv, Inc. has beefed up the predictive powers of its core ACH fraud-screening tool with additional data sources, enhancing banks' abilities to block suspicious electronic transactions in real time.

New payment card technologies are forcing Mastercard to break into a new set of BINs (bank identification numbers).

Visa Inc.’s mobile payments app, mVisa, has gone live in Kenya, where four local banks are supporting the QR code-based service.

German mobile payments startup SumUp failed to deliver on plans announced last year to invade the U.S., challenging Square on its home turf, but it wasn’t due to fear of the competition. Merchants were just much slower to act on EMV than SumUp expected.

The latest iOS update will soon enable many consumers to initiate payments via voice command, but a German bank is one of the first to take its service live.