Ripple Labs Inc., a venture capital-backed challenger to Western Union and Bitcoin, is for the first time gaining access to the U.S. banking system, and security hawks are raising eyebrows.

WASHINGTON — Congress should revisit the $50 billion-asset test used to subject larger banks to enhanced regulations and allow supervisors to look beyond an institution's size to assess its riskiness, Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry said Monday.

Apple, Samsung, PayPal, Square, Google Wallet among others along with countless financial institutions and retailers are fiercely marketing their applications to enable mobile payments.

Ingenico Group is leveraging its experience in EMV-chip terminal upgrades and new momentum from Apple Pay to better position itself for the U.S. conversion to smart-card technology.

Jimmy John's, a sandwich-shop chain based in Champaign, Illinois, said a hacker infiltrated payment systems at about 216 of its locations and stole credit- and debit-card information.

Spire Payments will supply Indian Overseas Bank with more than 7,500 mobile point of sale devices in its mPOS deployment in the Chennai region of India.

Visa Inc. is planning to hire 2,000 employees to strengthen its technology strategy.

Fifty-two percent of millennial respondents in a Zogby Analytics survey sponsored by Mitek Systems, a mobile imaging tech provider, perceive native apps as a safer solution than mobile websites for purchasing and banking.

LAS VEGAS — While nine hopefuls entered, five credit unions with innovative, forward-looking technology solutions were recognized with awards here during the 2014 CUNA Technology Council and Operations, Sales and Service Council Conference earlier this week.

Revel Systems' deal with the New Orleans-based Smoothie King franchise will be the largest deployment to date of its iPad point of sale software.

News of a data breach at Home Depot stores throughout the U.S. and Canada is compounding fears on the part of card holders that “big box” and other retailers can do little to protect them from credit and debit card fraud.

Klarna will target a range of merchants in the U.S., but will focus on e-commerce merchants that ship tangible goods. Its buy-now-pay-later model would, in most cases, result in the consumer paying for the item after receiving it in the mail.

Some banks are using mobile technology to answer a big challenge from regulators: how to offer consumers outside the mainstream more products and services.

PayPal's making moves to respond to the maturation of virtual currencies, entering into agreements with Bitcoin payment processors BitPay, Coinbase and GoGoin.

MyECheck has established the required relationships to proceed with the launch of its mobile payment apps early next year, a delay from its originally planned mid-2014 launch date.

PayItSimple, a credit card installment provider based in Herzliya, Israel, has announced its launch in the United States.

The payments industry has changed dramatically over the past year, and so has the mindset of those in the industry. The focus is shifting from mobile payments and Bitcoin to fraud mitigation and security.

Just a few days after debuting on Wall Street with one of the biggest initial public offerings to hit the U.S. market, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holdings has joined the Fast IDentity Online board.

Business-to-business payments provider Traxpay Inc. will expand its reach by routing B2B transactions across MasterCard Inc. rails.

Merchants using Revel Systems' iPad point-of-sale software will now have the option to incorporate Web ordering into the system, and will also be able to accept Apple Pay when Apple's mobile wallet launches next month.