Retailers

Google Inc.’s Aug. 15 announcement of an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings strengthens Google’s position in mobile payments, one observer says.

When Pago Mobile Inc. launched its mobile wallet with 53 merchants in Mountain View, Calif., last week, initial industry reaction focused on the smaller payments-application company venturing into turf more commonly associated with Google Inc. in northern California.

Closing out the tab in a busy restaurant or bar just got easier with the help of a mobile-payments application appropriately called “Tabbedout” from ATX Innovation Inc.

A former waiter at a TGI Friday’s restaurant in Maryland has been indicted on 16 counts of identity theft, theft and conspiracy to commit theft in a credit card skimming scheme that prosecutors say affected 73 individuals.

Payments-software provider Distra Pty. Ltd. of Sydney, Australia, is hiring a U.S.-based staff and has opened an office in Atlanta, the company announced recently.

With Google Inc.’s Aug. 15 announcement of an agreement to acquire Motorola Mobility Holdings, the search giant potentially has turbocharged its mobile-payment plans.

The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council intends to clear up confusion regarding tokenization, a process designed to protect payment card security.

An Australian credit union in Illawarra is trying to recover after several hundred members were victimized by a card-skimming operation.

An owner of a new restaurant likely would not hesitate to buy a $300 fire extinguisher to comply with local fire codes, but he might put off spending about half that much to ensure compliance with standards designed to protect customers’ credit card data, a new report suggests.

An owner of a new restaurant likely would not hesitate to buy a $300 fire extinguisher to comply with local fire codes, but he might put off spending about half that much to ensure compliance with standards designed to protect customers’ credit card data, a new report suggests.

Visa Inc.’s new U.S. EMV initiative will have far-reaching consequences for merchants and card issuers, but the other card networks may not follow it exactly in drawing their roadmaps for migrating to advanced chip card technologies, certain observers say.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the demise of the decoupled-debit card may have been greatly exaggerated.

Most large U.S. merchants easily will comply with Visa Inc.’s first level of incentives to make payment terminals ready to accept contact and contactless EMV cards next year as part of the card brand’s U.S. push toward chip card technology, but it may take smaller merchants a year or two to get there, payment industry experts suggest.

When newly acquired card customers from HSBC’s U.S. card program and ING’s online bank are folded into Capital One Financial Corp.’s existing base, they will have a rapidly expanding array of digital transaction and payments channels from which to choose.

Consumers accustomed to receiving coupons for product samples or trial sizes of laundry detergent or dish soap in the mail soon instead may receive private-label prepaid cards they could use at a retailer to obtain full-size versions.

If data-security standards compliance in the United States mirrors what has occurred in Europe, the onset of EMV chip-and-PIN technology in the U.S. will not mean major retailers will skip validating their compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard each year, the head of the PCI Security Standards Council contends.

Instead of dipping its toe into the mobile-payments pool, Heartland Payment Systems Inc. intends to make a splash with a retail application that can enable a merchant’s employees to complete sales transactions anywhere in or out of the store.

Visa Inc. has introduced a series of incentives to spur the U.S. to adopt chip cards–a change once considered as likely as the country switching to the metric system.

Online retailers looking to reduce their number of declined transactions from different countries have a new tool available in their payments-processing kit.

One man has shared his Starbucks prepaid card with the world, allowing anyone to spend and reload it using a feature of the card that was once called a security flaw.