Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The acquiring business, already fraught with rivalry, became even more competitive on Wednesday with an announcement from daily-deals giant Groupon Inc. that it will supply traditional point of sale terminals to merchants as part of a new initiative under its payments division. The Chicago-based company, which last year jumped into …

A judge in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday gave the Federal Reserve Board a week to indicate its position about a possible interim rule for implementing the Durbin Amendment, the part of 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act that regulates debit cards, after ruling late last month that the Fed’s current regulations do not …

Shopify Inc. hopes to lure small online sellers by the thousands to its e-commerce platform by making the typically vexatious business of taking payments as easy as possible. On Monday, the Ottawa-based company announced Shopify Payments, a service that lets Web merchants sign up to accept a broad range of …

By Jim Daly The big merchant acquirer Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC on Tuesday announced a mobile-payments service that includes a reader that plugs into smart phones as part of a broader new service for small businesses called Chase Checkout. After testing the service in five states, Dallas-based Chase Paymentech quietly …

The Isis smart-phone-based payments machine is finally getting in gear, observers say, in the wake of several recent developments involving the service that is jointly owned by three big mobile-telecommunications carriers. Giant card issuer JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Monday said that several of its cards will support the Isis …

By Jim Daly B is back. That is, what the Federal Reserve Board back in 2011 dubbed “Alternative B” for implementing the transaction-routing requirements in the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment. Alternative B would have required each debit card to provide the merchant access to at least two signature and two …

By Jim Daly The U.S. virtual-currency market grew 52% in 2012 and this year it could more than double to $10.9 billion in purchases, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. What’s more, virtual currency is moving beyond its online-game moorings and into more real-world settings, though …

By Linda Punch If independent sales organizations needed more evidence that the Federal Trade Commission is monitoring their activities more closely, it came last week with the filing of yet another complaint against an ISO. Within weeks of charging two ISOs with violations of the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule, the …

With a federal judge’s crucial decision only weeks away, a company formed to help merchants collect their share of the massive credit card interchange settlement is recruiting independent sales organizations to reach eligible businesses. Baltimore-based Brownstone Recovery Group has signed up more than 10 ISOs so far, according to Scott …

By Peter Lucas PayPal Inc. on Tuesday took more steps toward strengthening its in-store presence, and at the same time broadened the reach of its Bill Me Later lending service to consumers carrying private-label cards. Both arrangements are the result of an agreement with Alliance Data Systems Corp., a big …

More than 18 months after acquiring Point, a Sweden-based provider of payment gateway solutions to merchants, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will roll out the service to U.S. merchants beginning this fall. VeriFone intends to offer Point as a managed service through independent sales organizations …

In one of the most dramatic developments of the year in the electronic-payments business, a federal judge on Wednesday struck down the Federal Reserve Board’s pricing and routing rules for debit card transactions, arguing the banking regulator misinterpreted federal law. The rules, which implemented the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 …

First Data Corp.’s net loss widened in the second quarter on overall revenue that barely budged from the year-ago period, the huge transaction processor reported on Tuesday. The results throw into relief questions swirling around the Altanta-based company about whether its new top brass can kick-start growth. The company’s $189 …

Financial institutions wanting to expand the number of ATMs their customers can use in retail locations without those customers paying surcharges have a new option available under an approach announced late last week by Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. While Cardtronics has for years offered financial institutions the ability to put their …

Fresh from the launch of its GoBank mobile-banking product, Green Dot Corp. on Tuesday announced new marketing and distribution deals not only for GoBank but also for its core prepaid card program. Green Dot cards will be sold through 20,000 more retail stores, including locations belonging to Dollar Tree, Dollar …

Two powerful lawmakers on Friday wrote to the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board urging the central bank to scrap its debit card interchange caps and instead adopt limits in line with the more draconian regime proposed this week by the European Commission. In their letter to Fed Board chairman …

A federal indictment announced on Thursday against four Russians and a Ukrainian man casts new light on some of the biggest breaches of payment card data in recent years. The defendants, affiliated with notorious computer hacker Albert Gonzalez, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence but named as one of …

A trade group representing most of the nation’s debit networks has agreed to allow EMV applications other than its own to work on chip cards in the United States. The new position taken by the Secure Remote Payment Council represents what the group calls a “major compromise” and opens the …

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and EMV won’t be fully implemented in the United States for some time to come, but at least some foreign observers who have experienced nationwide deployment of the Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card standard are starting to show impatience with EMV’s sluggish U.S. progress. Fearing a …

Visa Inc.’s Interlink PIN-debit network is recovering after a devastating year following implementation in April 2012 of the transaction-routing requirements in the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment. Visa reported Wednesday that Interlink transaction volume rose 25% in its third quarter of fiscal 2013 ended June 30, a sharp turnaround from the …