Payments

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is pushing hard against charging fees for faster Internet access, a stance that's a relief to businesses like Dwolla that use the Internet to develop and deliver payment services.

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

Discover, the only major U.S. card brand not connected to Apple Pay, is thus one of the few major credit card issuers not shoehorning Apple into its ads. But Discover has never been one to ignore a marketing opportunity.

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.

A federal judge has upheld a Texas law that bars the state's retailers from charging an additional fee to customers who pay with a credit card.

As the Federal Reserve and other entities push toward developing a faster payments system in the U.S., it has become increasingly apparent that a good place to start is through debit networks.

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $4 million to settle charges that it made secured credit card loans in violation of New York law.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.'s finance arm agreed to buy a 25% stake in One97 Communications Ltd., owner of an online payments processor, to tap into India's growing e-commerce industry.

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

By linking mobile payments with money transfers, Western Union created a new use for Apple's mobile wallet. But it must still rigidly conform to the basic requirements of an Apple Pay transaction — without a bank account, there is no payment.

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.

A subprime credit card company in Delaware agreed to pay nearly $3 million in refunds and penalties for allegedly charging fees that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says violated federal law.

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

Deployments of biometrics are usually fairly challenging, but Apple has demonstrated through its Touch ID fingerprint system that it can scale a consumer biometric technology quickly. London-based ValidSoft predicts it can do the same for voice biometrics by using the microphone built into most consumer gadgets.

Efforts to apply biometric security to payments have reached the fraud-prone remittance market, as Touch ID takes hold for both incumbents such as Western Union and upstarts such as Xoom.

In a term often reserved for interior design, women's fashions or ballroom dancing, Apple Pay users call the mobile pay system "elegant" because of how easy it is to use.

WASHINGTON — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking to permanently ban a credit provider in Texas from offering any services because of allegations that it ran a "sham credit card" business.

Payment technology provider Adyen is establishing Bitcoin as a payment option for consumers playing online games from U.K.-based Jagex.

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.