Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The Federal Reserve Board on Tuesday released another report on debit card revenues and expenses and says it does not plan to propose changes to its controversial debit regulations implementing the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. Dodd-Frank requires the Fed to report on the debit card market every two …

  Heads look like they’re going to roll at troubled point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. as it begins what chief executive Douglas Bergeron calls a “rebuilding year” in the wake of missteps that contributed to lower-than-expected revenues. Bergeron told stock analysts Tuesday that the company has initiated “an exhaustive …

A spate of cease-and-desist orders by the state of Illinois against unlicensed money transmitters has ensnared eight payments companies, including such prominent ones as Square Inc. and NetSpending Holdings Inc. An agency quietly issued orders against both firms in January that seemingly would prevent them from doing business in the …

Could the new Chase Merchant Services (CMS) processing entity announced Feb. 26 by JPMorgan Chase and Co. and Visa Inc. be a harbinger of a major change in the way bank card payments operate? The payments industry is abuzz with talk about how CMS could shake things up by enabling …

Now that New Jersey has become the third state to legalize online gambling, the market for the first time in years has begun to offer possibilities to acquirers as a promising new source of transaction volume. But questions remain about how and how soon the new state laws will be …

Visa Inc. and banking giant JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Tuesday announced a 10-year partnership that promises to shake up the merchant-acquiring world by creating direct links between card issuers and merchants. Chase, which owns the nation’s second-largest acquirer, Chase Paymentech, is licensing a private version of Visa’s VisaNet transaction-processing …

Nine months after unveiling its digital-wallet strategy, MasterCard Inc. on Monday announced the start of that strategy’s implementation. Known as MasterPass, the new wallet platform enables mobile payments by consumers using either near-field communication (NFC) technology or quick-response (QR) codes to trigger links between handsets and merchant terminals. Wallets based …

Visa Inc. is teaming up with the hot smart-phone manufacturer Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to kick-start the market for near-field communication (NFC) payments, and it’s also got a deal with technology provider Roam to develop mobile payments. Under an agreement with South Korea-based Samsung that Visa announced Monday, banks and …

  The funk at VeriFone Systems Inc. continued late Wednesday when the leading point-of-sale terminal maker said revenues and profits for its first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended Jan. 31 would come in far short of earlier predictions. The downward forecast triggered a selloff in VeriFone’s shares, whose price was …

  With the United States playing catch-up with Canada and much of Europe in deploying chip card technology, security firms are starting to respond to online operators’ fears that the arrival of chips at the point of sale will drive fraud to the Internet. One of the latest of these …

  The effort to harness debit card networks for near-instant person-to-person payments is moving apace. The latest development is this week’s announcement that the Houston-based Pulse electronic funds transfer network has enabled a service that will let cardholders pay each other by entering their debit card PINs on a so-called …

While still down from high levels in 2009, identity fraud rose for the second straight year in 2012, according to the latest annual ID-fraud study from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin estimates that 5.26% of U.S. consumers were ID-fraud victims last year, up from 4.90% in 2011 and the recent …

  n The report, which covers the third quarter of last year, documents a steady decline in both the number of unique sites hosting phishing attacks and the volume of reported attacks. The number of phishing sites detected by the APWG fell in step-like fashion from 63,253 in April to …

No stranger to prepaid cards, payment card processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) will become a major force in the prepaid niche with its planned cash acquisition of program manager NetSpend Holdings Inc. that values NetSpend at $1.4 billion. The deal the two companies announced late Tuesday would pay NetSpend …

  The PCI Security Standards Council on Thursday released yet another set of data-protection guidelines for mobile payments, this one aimed at merchants using smart phones and tablet computers to accept credit and debit cards. Although it touches on many points, the guidance especially focuses on the software running on …

  Merchants that think by hiring a cloud-based provider to handle their payment card security tasks they’ll never have to worry again about protecting card data had better think twice, according to the PCI Security Standards Council. “Just because people outsource to a cloud service provider, they’re not done,” says …

  Aiming to resolve a vexing security problem presented by user names and passwords, Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Nok Nok Labs launched on Tuesday with $15 million in financing. Next month, Nok Nok will start shipping software that will allow users of PCs and mobile devices to identify themselves to …

  Fraudsters are turning their attention to e-commerce sites, continuing to improve the malware they use to find and harvest payment card data, and sensing opportunity in mobile devices, according to the latest annual data-breach report by Trustwave Holdings Inc. Chicago-based Trustwave, a leading data-forensics investigator and security vendor, based …

  Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) on Monday rolled out its entry in the person-to-person payments sweepstakes and, as with other providers in recent months, its service offers real-time settlement. Indeed, People Pay—the name FIS has given its new P2P service—is built on the PayNet network the company introduced …

  A little more than 90 days into its pilot, Isis, a mobile-payments consortium formed by wireless carriers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility, and T-Mobile USA, announced on Tuesday at the 2013 Payment Summit in Salt Lake City that it has more than 10,000 merchant locations in Salt Lake and Austin, …