payments

PayPal is rolling out a new payments platform for online and local merchants that it says will give customers an improved shopping and buying experience.

The platform will include location-based offers, and will be accessible from any device (not just mobile phones), PayPal President Scott Thompson announced in a blog post today.

"PayPal is reimagining money and making it work better for merchants and consumers--whatever device you're on, wherever you are in the world, and however you prefer to pay (whether that's cash, credit, or installments)," Thompson wrote.

The eBay-owned pioneer of peer-to-peer payments gave merchants including Home Depot and Sports Authority a sneak peek at its new offerings today in Los Angeles, but it hasn't yet offered the public too many details beyond words like "seamless" and "flexibility." The PayPal graphic above does offer some hints as to what the platform will offer, though, including bar code scanning and real-time inventory availability.

We also know, thanks to AllThingsD's one-on-one briefings with PayPal execs, that merchants won't need to adopt new infrastructure or purchase new terminals to opt in to the system. Neither, apparently, will customers need to upgrade their phones. … Read more

Nokia is jumping even further onto the NFC bandwagon with plans to support the mobile payments technology in its latest Symbian phones and all future phones.

The Finish phone maker's current C7 handset and its new 700, 701, and 600 phones already include the NFC hardware and will fully support it by the first half of 2012, according to NFC World and other sources.

The company also plans to outfit all upcoming Symbian phones with the NFC chips as part of its aggressive move into the mobile payments market.

"From now on, all of our products will have … Read more

The cast of Buzz Out Loud has a message for HP that we hope they'll hear: guys. Seriously. Please stop talking. Don't tell the press you may or may not spin off your PC unit if you can figure out what that would mean for the company, and don't let the EVP of the PC business say HP might get back into tablets. I mean, how hard is that, really? Plus, Wikileaks springs a major leak, and Beyonce's baby pwns Twitter.

AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T- Mobile USA plan to invest an additional $100 million into their mobile payment joint venture, Isis, to help get the project off the ground more quickly, Bloomberg reported Monday.

According to Bloomberg's unnamed sources familiar with the joint venture, the investment is contingent on whether Isis, which was developed to turn cell phones into payment devices, could sign up additional banks and merchants.

A spokesman for Isis declined to comment on the rumors.

The joint venture, formed in November, has been somewhat slow to get off the ground. But the additional funding … Read more

Verizon is now selling Intuit's GoPayment credit card reader for free at its retail stores.

Thanks to a new partnership between Verizon Wireless and Intuit, business customers can get the mobile card reader for free after a $30 rebate and the activation of a GoPayment account. The card reader and its app can be found at all of Verizon's retail stores and as well as its business-to-business outlets.

Intuit's GoPayment system is geared toward small and midsize businesses that need to process credit cards on the go. The reader itself plugs into a smartphone or tablet. After customers swipe their credit or debit card through the reader, the payment is processed automatically and the funds sent to the merchant's bank account within a few days.… Read more

A year from now, MasterCard and its PayPass tap-to-pay network will serve as a cornerstone of mobile-payments in the U.S.

At least, that's according Ed McLaughlin, head of emerging payments for the world's second-largest payments network.

"The PayPass functionality will serve as an anchor," McLaughlin said in a recent interview with CNET.

Those are bold words considering the mobile-payments business is still in its infancy. But MasterCard has reason to be confident. It's the only credit card company to play a role in both of the major burgeoning alliances, including the Google Wallet initiative … Read more

The digital wallet wars have begun. And credit card giant Visa and search behemoth Google are likely to be among the first to face off in the market as they each try to convince consumers to ditch their real wallets for ones that store credit cards and other information on their cell phones.

In May, Visa and Google announced separately their plans to offer a so-called digital wallet or an application that stores credit card and rewards information to enable people to use their phones to pay for things.

The hope is that these digital wallets in conjunction with near-field communications technology, … Read more

Web Loanalyzer is a free loan calculator written in HTML and JavaScript. It quickly analyzes a loan's parameters and explains in plain English how long it will take to pay the loan off, how much interest will be paid, and so on. We took a look at Web Loanalyzer Q1.

We extracted Web Loanalyzer's zipped program file and clicked it, which opened the calculator in our Web browser. Web Loanalyzer is locally hosted, so you don't need an active Internet connection to use it. The program's interface is small, about the size of two banner ads … Read more

Visa is planning to roll out dual-mode chips in its infrastructure in an effort to step up mobile payment adoption. Meanwhile, it's deploying a mix of carrots and sticks to get merchants on board.

Specifically, Visa is aiming to prepare payment infrastructure for NFC (near-field communication) mobile payments. Google has pushed NFC payments, and other mobile phone players are aiming to turn your smartphone into a wallet. Visa will support EMV and NFC. EMV, which stands for Europay, MasterCard, and Visa, is a global standard for credit and debit payment cards. EMV has been popular abroad, but lags in … Read more