Payments

Rallying its members to wipe out passwords, the Faster IDentity Online Alliance — an organization of more than 150 payments and technology businesses — released standards Dec. 9 for multi-factor e-commerce authentication.

Consumer credit card debt in the United States has been rising in recent years, although as the labor markets improve, defaults on such cards have fallen to multi-decade lows.

?Square Inc. has hired former Visa marketing executive Kevin Burke to lead its customer acquisition initiatives in retail, paid, Web and events marketing channels.??

Banks would have to upgrade their systems to accommodate faster transactions, and originating banks would pay the receiving financial institutions a fee to cover those costs, under a plan from Nacha, the industry group that sets ACH rules.

Three former stars of the National Football League are acting as "ambassadors" for a credit card promotion by $18.5 billion Pentagon Federal Credit Union.

MasterCard is investing in and partnering with card technology company Dynamics to embed greater function into U.S. payment cards, a mission that has sputtered in past years.

The Aschheim, Germany-based payments company will process subscriptions for the TV station's Sky Starter and Sky Film packages.

Mobile payment share for Alipay, the payment affiliate of Alibaba, rose to 54% of payments in the first ten months of 2014 from 22% all last year.

Visa and Kofax are attempting to simplify complex invoice payments in Asia by introducing technology into processes that have long been handled manually.

SignaPay, a payment processing company based in Irving, Texas, has acquired PayHub, a merchant services company in San Rafael, Calif.

Alipay, the payments affiliate of Alibaba, leads the market for online third-party payment services in China, according to a recent iResesarch, a Chinese market research firm.

As mobile commerce and other new technologies change the way people shop, fraudsters are changing their methods to adapt. Banks, fintech providers and consumers are all looking at security in new ways.

Virgin Money has struck a seven-year deal with the British financial tech company Monitise to develop the U.K. bank's mobile products.

Multi-account card providers Coin and Stratos Card have an EMV compliance gap that may prove problematic for their relationships with card issuers.

MasterCard will soon make its digital wallet available to consumers in China.

Payments innovation normally migrates to the U.S. from Canada, which is at a more advanced stage of deployment with EMV-chip cards and other technology. But that's not the case for business-to-business payments.

Zomato hasn't been able to add payment capabilities to its restaurant discovery app in its home base of India, but the company has found a more welcoming audience in Dubai, where it plans a pilot next month.

Sprint's Boost Mobile Wallet and Sprint Money Express have added features that allow users to buy and send electronic gift cards.

For Cubic Transportation Systems, the term "NextCity" describes a city in which consumers use a single account for transit and parking while making payments through a smart card or mobile app.

Dutch digital security company Gemalto and Chungwa Telecom, a Taiwanese firm, plan to commercially launch Near Field Communication-based mobile payment system for the telco's subscribers.