Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

  Already the subject of new debit card regulations, the payments industry is coming in for more scrutiny from the federal government. A Federal Trade Commission official told attendees at a merchant-acquiring conference on Thursday that the government has formed a task force to monitor third-party payment-services providers. The feds’ …

  The mobile-wallet race, which has attracted a slew of entrants in recent months, is about to get more crowded on fears that established merchant acquirers could be elbowed out of the nascent mobile-payments business. Apriva Inc., a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based provider of wireless technology for payments, will launch in November …

Confirming other findings that payment card usage is picking up in the U.S., Visa Inc.’s credit and debit card dollar volume rose 9% in the network’s fourth fiscal 2011 quarter ended Sept. 30 to $516 billion from $474 billion a year earlier. Payment transactions increased 7.3% to 10.5 billion. Visa’s …

Shadows darken the recent economic news, but early third-quarter reports from payments-industry companies paint a much sunnier picture. The big card-issuer and merchant processor Total System Services Inc., for instance, on Tuesday said it was increasing its dividend by 43%, its first dividend increase in five years. Last week, Visa …

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  With the holiday season weeks away, more major retailers are now offering so-called virtual gift cards. But few make the experience of buying, sending, and redeeming the digital payment products easy or pleasant, according to a report issued this week. Some 59 of the 100 largest online merchants, ranked …

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  More and more shoppers are turning to e-commerce, but online merchants’ payment practices leave them poorly positioned to exploit this trend for sales, according to a recently released report. Notably, the biggest online and multichannel retailers meet on average only 36% of criteria for payment options, according to Javelin …

  PayPal Inc. will pilot its latest move to the point of sale with an undisclosed merchant this quarter, add more merchants early in 2012, and establish merchant pricing for the service over the next three to six months, eBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe told stock analysts on Wednesday. …

  George R. Jensen Jr., founder and chief executive of USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), has resigned under a cloud, casting a pall of uncertainty over the provider of wireless payment hardware and networking services for vending machines just as new interchange schedules affecting small debit card transactions threaten to crimp …

  Many community bankers say their payment revenues are declining, and they are bracing for hits from higher expenses from complying with regulations and from fraud while at the same time trying to ramp up new services such as mobile payments. The findings come from the Independent Community Bankers of …

A trade group of ATM independent sales organizations on Wednesday filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. alleging that network rules illegally forbid them from imposing lower surcharges for ATM transactions that go over the rails of unaffiliated electronic funds transfer networks. Those anti-discrimination rules require …

The unceasing controversy over the Durbin Amendment and its debit card interchange price controls continued Wednesday when two members of Congress declared they would introduce legislation to repeal the measure. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives might very well pass the bipartisan proposal, but its survival chances are much lower in …

  n To use PayPal Access, a site must sign up for a PayPal account but is not obliged to accept PayPal. The new system then gives the site access to some 100 million active PayPal users, who can control how much information they want to share. If a user …

  PayPal Inc., a dominant processor of e-commerce transactions, has made no secret lately of its ambitions to move into the world of brick-and-mortar commerce. The only missing element was a physical token that account holders could use at the point of sale. Now it appears that void will soon …

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Apriva Inc., a major processor of payment transactions from vending machines, this week told machine owners that it is working to assure their card-acceptance costs will remain stable despite the uncertain status of a program it has with Visa Inc. that gives them an interchange break if they install hardware …

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U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin on Tuesday said he is aware that new Visa and MasterCard interchange schedules will cause some merchants to pay much more in interchange when a consumer uses a debit card from a big bank to pay for small purchases. Durbin said the Federal Reserve Board should …