Economy

Visa and MasterCard have aggressively worked to establish their V.me and MasterPass wallets since launching both products within the past year, and both companies are trying to learn from their past efforts in e-payments.

Online investment management service Betterment LLC will acquire ImpulseSave, a startup that designs software meant to encourage people to save.

Square's new P2P service, Square Cash, is meant to be so straightforward that you don't need an app to use it — but Square published an app anyway. The Square Cash app joins a growing suite of Square apps for merchants and consumers.

The Federal Trade Commission should take more steps to police the acquiring industry and halt fraudulent practices, says Robert Carr, longtime CEO of Heartland Payment Systems Inc.

The smartphone blog Android Police has discovered several latent features buried in the code underlying the software for Google’s wearable computer. Among them are panoramic image capture (suitable for check imaging), a stopwatch, and commands to play music or games.

Udi's, which operates a group of cafes and pizza establishments in the Denver area, just launched a customized mobile payments program with the goal of obtaining the data that is normally invisible to it when patrons pay with credit and debit cards.

News of the ETA PAC came Wednesday in a presentation by Jason Oxman, the trade group’s CEO, at the association’s annual Strategic Leadership Forum.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Robert Carr, longtime CEO of Heartland Payment Systems Inc., made good on his promise to deliver a controversial keynote speech at a conference here last week.

Mobile software developers increasingly use common platforms for payments and other functions. And many of those developers rely on Braintree, a company eBay is purchasing for $800 million.

If independent sales organizations aren't willing to shift their business models in the coming years, they'll go extinct in a payments industry bustling with aggressive, agile startups that skip the middleman and go directly to the merchant.

Square has officially launched its person-to-person payment system, Square Cash, which lets debit card users send funds by typing an email.

At 800 stores, the Checkers/Rally's fast-food chain may seem overshadowed by giants like McDonald's. But to CardFree, merchants of Checkers' size are ideal customers for its mobile payments technology.

Companies that are automating the acceptance process believe they are cutting out the waiting game for merchants, and in turn helping ISOs bring in more merchants faster.

The Loop Fob and Loop ChargeCase send a magnetic transmission to a payment terminal’s mag stripe reader through a process dubbed Magnetic Secure Transmission, or MST.

Gun sellers, medical marijuana shops, pornography sites, bitcoin exchanges and mug-shot galleries share a common stigma — many payments companies refuse to do business with them, whether or not they run afoul of the law.

There has been a flurry of activity in payments technology in recent days. But as the dust settles, it's becoming clear that some of the most disruptive products are coming from outside the payments industry.

Security can be an expensive, time-consuming investment for small merchants, and most have a mindset that security hacks won't happen to them. But independent sales organizations must take an active role in protecting even the merchants that don't want to be protected.

Dickie Brennan is a New Orleans staple, a local business owner whose family has operated restaurants in the Crescent City for decades. A protégé of legendary chef Paul Prudhomme, Brennan is also an early adopter of a new mobile technology he hopes will change the way people dine out.

As the world accelerates toward faster and contactless payments, the U.S. has been reinforcing checks, avoiding global payments standards and pursuing closed-loop innovations that further isolate it.

E-Commerce sales on the Visa network in the U.S. surpassed $1 billion 188 times during the first nine months of the 2013 (out of 273 total days), a 16% increase in volume over the same period last year, the card network reports.