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QR codes, which are commonly used in mobile wallets to link to a consumer's payment account, can just as easily link to phishing sites, malware and other nasty surprises.

Merchants who in recent years viewed mobile payments as experimental now say they consider the technology vital in e-commerce, even though many remain concerned about fraud.

The recent security breaches at Nieman Marcus and Target remind us in the payments industry that as criminal efforts to steal cardholder data become more sophisticated, so must the methods we use to prevent these crimes.

Some of the toughest types of payments fraud to combat aren't from an overseas hackers den but from everyday people misusing their own accounts or those of a relative, says Rick Lynch, Verifi's senior vice president of business development.

Webster Bank's use of advanced alerting allows it to receive valuable, real-time feedback from its customers about how they prefer to make payments, says Greg Jacobi, senior vice president of distribution and customer experience for Webster Bank.

There's a new Bitcoin wallet and vault provider in town, Xapo, launched by payments veteran Wences Casares with $20 million in funding from investors.

Preparing for a Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance assessment is a major task for any size organization.

EMVCo, the EMV standard governing body has released specifications for payment tokenization, a process that it says will strengthen security on card-not-present transactions initiated by EMV-chip cards.

Mobile banking technology company Monitise is attempting to make account alerts two-way conversations, with an eye on marketing and security capabilities for payments applications.

Three months after coming to light, the massive exposure of 40 million card accounts at Target Corp. still has the payments industry and consumers talking about what should be done to prevent this happening again. In the United States, that is.