Kate Fitzgerald

As more merchants worry about EMV card slowdowns ahead of the holiday shopping season—when bottlenecks at checkout points could lead to many lost sales—more companies are coming up with their own ways to slash EMV payment times.

For many restaurants that originally put EMV on the back burner because of technical complexities and a lower general risk of counterfeit card fraud, waiting to support chip cards has proven to be the right decision.

The biggest surprise for many who awaited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s final rule for prepaid cards was discovering that its reach extends to some of the payments industry’s highest-profile tech firms, such as PayPal Inc.’s Venmo, Square Inc.’s Square Cash and Dwolla.

U.S. Bank’s Voyager Network enables fleet managers to track and control commercial fuel purchases, and now the platform also provides key fuel and vehicle usage data from fill-ups at private, unattended fueling sites.

Independent ATM operator Cardtronics plc is expanding to Australia and New Zealand with the purchase of Canada’s DirectCash Payments Inc., which operates ATMs in several regions.

The traditional audience for prepaid cards is the underbanked or unbanked, many of whom are excluded from the mainstream financial services system due to their lacking credit histories. Green Dot is nevertheless pursuing this audience with a Platinum Visa secured credit card that requires an upfront cash deposit and carries a raft of fees.

The traditional audience for prepaid cards is the underbanked or unbanked, many of whom are excluded from the mainstream financial services system due to their lacking credit histories. Green Dot is nevertheless pursuing this audience with a Platinum Visa secured credit card that requires an upfront cash deposit and carries a raft of fees.

British cosmetics powerhouse The Body Shop this week will accept Alipay at three of its London stores, through a new integration by Germany-based Wirecard.

IBM is introducing a set of new systems and tools to help banks in the U.S., Europe and Asia adapt to certain global initiatives to modernize financial services, including advancing real-time payments and sharing customer data with third parties through APIs.

Visa Inc. is trying a new gambit offset consumers' irritation with hassles surrounding the messy EMV chip-card migration—it's introducing a winsome young woman to console the masses.

After several years of a sharp decline in B-to-B check payments, in the last year or so the trend has begun to level off, the latest AFP data suggests.

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.