ISO & Agent

Mobile payment company iZettle is countering the idea that EMV compliance increases merchant expense by offering a free version of its mobile chip-and-PIN card reader.

Starbucks' decision to support Apple Pay within the coffee chain's mobile payment app seems like a natural alliance of two major forces in mobile payments, but it raises a significant question: Why not do the same with Square, with which Starbucks has much deeper ties?

The Australian market has used EMV-chip cards for more than a decade, necessitating a very different approach to the mobile point of sale.

American Express will certainly suffer when its 16-year cobranding deal with Costco ends in 2016, but its executives will spend the next year building up the card brand's digital payment products to create enough opportunities to ease the company's short-term pain and guarantee its long-term health.

Encryption has become a political hot potato for the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council as it compiles a list of validated encryption vendors and services — and leaves off some companies that say they deserve to be recognized as secure.

Samsung is widely reported to be adding mobile-payment technology from LoopPay to its next Galaxy smartphone. Such an approach would be vastly different from that of Apple, PayPal or MCX's CurrentC — and it would address a key issue with LoopPay's own business model.

U.S. gas stations can wait until October 2017 to begin accepting EMV-chip cards or face the consequence of an increase in fraud liability, but there's already concern that the work at gas pumps could stall.

Thirty-four percent of merchants interviewed late last year for an Aite Group research report on EMV readiness had never heard of the U.S. migration to EMV-chip payment cards, despite the fast-approaching October 2015 deadline set by the card networks.

CardFlight has updated its SwipeSimple mobile point of sale device, which allows merchants to take payments and manage their business from smartphones and tablets.

Mobile wallets are typically designed to be most useful at the point of sale. Israeli location-based technology vendor WiseSec sees an opportunity to extend a mobile app's utility throughout the store by using beacons that can sense how far away a shopper is.

First Data is planning to launch a new suite of payment processing software in partnership with Capgemini, a financial consulting and outsourcing firm based in Paris.

Mobile payments provider Spindle will provide aggregation technology to EggZack to resell to mobile point of sale and e-commerce merchants.

There have been many attempts in recent years to convince issuers and consumers to store multiple payment accounts in a single high-tech card, typically with an emphasis on consumer choice. A new approach uses the same technology but packs in data analytics to take some of that choice out of consumers' hands.

PayPal is starting the year without its vice president and general manager of retail and prepaid of the past four years.

It may take years for most small merchants to accept EMV-chip cards in the U.S., but the country's ultimate goal of adopting the secure payment technology is coming together faster than what was seen in other EMV markets.

The rapid pace of mobile point of sale technology and advanced merchant services is pressuring traditional terminal makers to ensure that their devices are not only still relevant, but capable of evolution.

The U.K. is rapidly becoming a target for payment crime, with malware on the rise and the country poised for fraud spikes as crooks abandon EMV-protected terminals to target the more vulnerable e-commerce channel.

The introduction of Apple Pay has also thrust Near Field Communication-based contactless payment technology out of the wings and into the spotlight.

The launch of the U.S.'s first regulated bitcoin exchange gives an already curious merchant base more of a reason to jump into virtual currency.

The processor Total System Services Inc. has entered into an agreement with terminal maker Ingenico to support a wide range of payment types, including magnetic stripe, EMV, Near Field Communication and Apple Pay.