Cards

Cash is flourishing in the digital era, “Freakonomics” author Stephen Dubner asserts in a video the ATM Industry Association posted on YouTube and other social-media sites.

Facebook is working with Payments technology provider Marqeta Inc. to add features to its stored-value Facebook Card.

Sam Yam was the college roommate of Jack Conte, half of the indie band Pomplamoose. Together, they founded Patreon to help artists like Conte raise funds from fans online.

Payments technology provider ZooZ has developed a product that combines mobile payments with advertising.

Interchange fees often take the spotlight in discussions about card acceptance costs, but they are just one of many factors in the increasingly complex system that determines the price merchants pay for taking plastic cards.

Leaf, which offers a tablet specifically for in-store card payments, has added new features designed to ease user experience and attract third-party developers.

Square has taken its biggest shot yet at traditional payment terminal manufacturers with Square Stand, a new card reader built to house an iPad that can be used in place of a stationary point of sale terminal.

PayPal will offer free payment processing through the end of 2013 to merchants that “trade in” their cash registers and adopt mobile point of sale technologies, in a move to entice small merchants to adopt digital payments.

Prepaid card marketer Card.com now offers a prepaid card for Star Trek fans.

Visa Europe Ltd. plans to "significantly" reduce the fees it sets for processing cross- border credit-card payments in a bid to allay European Union competition concerns, the bloc's antitrust watchdog said.

Prepaid cards have been at the heart of several data breaches in recent years because their traits can make them easier for fraudsters to exploit.

Earlier today Groupon POS, a mobile payment app for merchants using iPads as point of sale systems, was released on iTunes, but the app has since been pulled from the app store.

Visa is adding electronic capabilities to its Visa Offers rewards program, leveraging online and mobile technology to bring offers closer to the point of sale.

Roam, a Boston-based Ingenico subsidiary that sells mobile commerce technology, will partner with iPayment to sell a range of mobile payment services to merchants.

Typically, I don't cover or analyze so-called payments innovations that merely embrace and extend the legacy infrastructure, but a new middleware startup, CardFlight, could actually operate as a payments "air traffic controller" because its code sits directly between the consumer and the processor.

Simon Haslam is becoming president and CEO of Elavon at a time of extreme stress for payments processors, which face nimble competitors, new payment standards and high-profile security risks.

The identities of the card processing companies whose systems were breached in a massive cyber offensive have surfaced.

NorsePayments wants to make it harder for card thieves to perform fraudulent card-not-present transactions.

A massive cyber offensive in which millions of dollars were stolen from two Middle Eastern banks through ATMs in dozens of countries could have been prevented had better security controls been in place at the card processors, the ATMs and the banks involved, observers say. The security lapses could lead to legal liability for many of the companies duped in the process.

The $45 million prepaid card crime spree, recently revealed by law enforcement agencies, is the latest in a long string of hacks on payment processors.