Retailers

A technical problem affecting the Visa network barred consumers from using their credit and debit cards for about 45 minutes on Sunday, the cards company said.

Braintree has opened the door to its online payment services to more than 110,000 merchants using Magento Inc.’s eCommerce Solutions as its online shopping cart, the company announced March 29.

Global Payments Inc. now confirms it is the source of the huge breach affecting cards carrying the major network brands (see story).

Ingenico SA plans to provide wireless terminals for more than 500 retail stores throughout the Canary Islands to support consumers using the Cajasiete Sincontacto contactless card, the French terminal maker announced March 30.

TenPay has signed a strategic agreement to provide Taikang Life Insurance Co. Ltd. online payment and settlement services, the China-based third-party payments provider announced this week.

If the Merchant Advisory Group is nothing else, it sure has been a persistent voice in supporting chip-and-PIN card transactions as the most-secure option for eventual U.S. acceptance of EMV smart cards.

Yespay International Ltd. has added advanced encryption to its global card-payment service, the London-based company announced this week.

Carpet cleaners, window cleaners, gardeners and operators in other trades working individually or with small companies traditionally have not accepted payment cards because of the costs involved. Acceptacard Ltd. is hoping to resolve the expense dilemma, at least in the United Kingdom.

With mobile-payment technology advancing seemingly at the speed of a mobile payment itself, one has to wonder how long it might be before consumers wouldn’t need, or even possess, plastic cards to conduct transactions.

MasterCard Worldwide plans to offer a new tool to help merchants mitigate the risk of fraud in online transactions.

First Data Corp. is giving the name “Universal Commerce” to the company’s campaign to combine online and offline shopping and loyalty rewards.

As new card-fraud controls emerge, even cards used to purchase cocktails aboard airplanes are getting closer scrutiny.

If PayPal Inc. strikes with a new payment application, it stands to reason Square Inc. would respond with a new twist on its mobile-payment service.

Unobtrusive until now, a set of unrelated security requirements is about to become pretty unpopular, and costly.

A recent acquisition is enabling Trustwave to add malicious-software detection to the data-security scans the company performs to check compliance with Payment Card Industry data security standards.

Iovation Inc. considers protecting online merchants from hackers looking to steal payment card data a top priority, but the security vendor also can boast of some crime-solving skills.

As traditional and emerging payment providers scrap over many aspects of the mobile-payments infrastructure being built in the U.S., an overriding concern for consumers and industry leaders for emerging payments of all types continues to be security.

A Singapore-based company last week announced the planned launched of a mobile-payment service that uses a card-reader device similar to the one offered by Square Inc. and other companies.

Speculation about one of the world’s largest payment processors going public in early 2012 had potential investors humming last summer. On March 22, Vantiv Inc. turned eight months of speculation into reality with its initial offering on the New York Stock Exchange, expected to raise $500 million for the Cincinnati-based processor.

A federal court has rejected civil claims brought by five credit unions and one bank stemming from the massive 2008 data breach at Heartland Payment Systems that exposed millions of cardholders to fraudulent transactions.