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.

Banks’ dilemmas around sharing data and embracing open payments technology are becoming a more urgent concern in Europe due to regulatory pressure, and fintech firms are starting to take notice.

France-based supermarket giant Carrefour and Gemalto leaned on Host Card Emulation (HCE) to create a new solution with the sought-after feature of combining mobile payments and the store’s loyalty program within a single app.

Netherlands-based ING is the latest bank to extend person-to-person (P-to-P) payments services to bank customers using popular social media platforms.

Facing a growing threat from TransferWise and other specialists working to streamline cross-border payments, Barclays and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) are trying a new system enabling customers to zap funds between the two banks in real time.

A new tool developed by the federal government may put the brakes on certain counterfeit card scams during the holidays, if law enforcement agencies can replicate the results of an initial test.

The one thing payment terminal hardware makers should have been sure of this year was relatively strong demand from merchants finally upgrading to EMV-compatible equipment after the slow start last year to the U.S. chip-card migration. But that's not how it's turning out.

Sweden’s iZettle is following a now-familiar playbook to fuel its expansion in Europe with its acquisition of intelligentpos, a company specializing in business-management tools popular with restaurants and other small to midsize businesses.

Square Inc. has long hinted it plans to expand to Europe and new clues suggest its base camp will be in the U.K. for an ambitious push into several countries. But its rivals got there first, and have had years to build their defenses.

Mobile technology is radically changing the way people hail taxis, book lodging, consume entertainment and find prospective dates, but the same magic isn’t happening with how people spend money.

Chinese handset maker Xiaomi has entered China’s booming mobile payments market with Mi Pay, a contactless payments service running on China UnionPay’s network with support from 20 local banks and six mass-transit systems in the country.