Technology

Even if shoppers of Amazon.com's Prime Day event — advertised as better than Black Friday — found more to mock than to buy, the promotion last week marked the acceleration of an "on-demand economy" that other retailers can no longer ignore.

New York State's interim bank superintendent is asking pointed questions of a new instant messaging service. The outcome of the inquiry could broadly affect the way vendors work with regulators.

Discover Financial Services in Riverwoods, Ill., continued its run of quarterly profit declines in the second quarter, due primarily to higher costs for compliance, marketing and customer rewards.

Amex will terminate its agreement with Costco in the U.S. next year, a relationship that accounted for 20 percent of Amex's worldwide loans and 8 percent of customer spending.

Apple executives didn’t flaunt Apple Pay transaction numbers or Apple Watch sales figures during a July 21 third-quarter earnings call, but they did provide some measure of merchant acceptance of the growing mobile payment system.

Identity theft protection company LifeLock is coming under fire from the Federal Trade Commission for failing to adequately protect customers' credit card and bank account data, Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information, among other allegations.

As more point of sale terminals include connections to the Internet and customers' mobile devices, payment companies may need to consider themselves in an "Internet of Things" environment — with all of the risks that implies.

When a cyberthief attacked Ashley Madison — a dating website for cheaters — with the stated goal of demonstrating that the site’s mechanism for deleting customer data didn’t work, it sent a signal that should be heeded by any company that handles sensitive data.

Data breaches happen so frequently these days that many consumers have “breach fatigue.” However, the threat does not die when public interest does. Stolen data moves faster than breaches can be detected, heightening the risk for merchants.

Apple Inc. showed how to combine biometrics and tokenization in a mainstream product, and now companies of all sizes are working to build on this combination.