Visa

Visa announced a broad mobile wallet service today that includes near field communication and other technologies for making retail purchases and for allowing person-to-person transactions from wireless devices.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was granted bail Tuesday by a U.K. judge. Assange, 39, has been in jail since turning himself over to Scotland Yard authorities. He is the subject of a sex-crimes investigation in Sweden and is fighting extradition that that country.

I admit it, I was as naive as everyone when hackers associated with the group Anonymous announced they would retaliate against companies that recently stopped providing online services for WikiLeaks after the whistle-blowing organization began releasing classified U.S. State Department documents.

Credit cards featuring smartcard technology have been standard fare in Europe and elsewhere for years -- but not in the U.S., where financial institutions still use cards based on less-secure magnetic stripe technology. That may be about to change.

The processing firm Heartland Payment Systems has been reinstated to Visa Inc.'s list of service providers deemed compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Acknowledging the need for controls that go beyond those offered by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard, a senior Visa Inc. executive Thursday described two new initiatives to reduce payment card fraud being tested by the company.

Days after Visa seemingly confirmed that a data breach had taken place at a third payment processor, following on the recent breach disclosures by Heartland Payment Systems and RBS WorldPay, the credit card company now is saying that there was no new security incident after all. In actuality, Visa said in a statement issued Friday, alerts that it sent recently to banks and credit unions warning them about a compromise at a payment processor were related to the ongoing investigation of a previously known breach.