Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

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 …

  n “It’s not final by any means,” vows Patrick H. Gaines, chief executive of Vancouver, British Columbia-based LML. The company is preparing an appeal of the patent office’s action, he says, and has also applied for its own re-examination, which could allow it to add or amend claims. “Certain …

  CashStar Inc. plans early next year to roll out a mobile app that will let consumers tap unredeemed rewards points held at banks to buy digital gift cards from major merchants. The app will also feature location-based alerts to let users know when they are near a merchant issuer. …

  Two very different financial institutions are adding or expanding their mobile remote deposit capture services to meet what they say is growing customer acceptance of the new banking channel that removes paper from the payments system and hitches banks and credit unions onto the rising smart-phone star. On the …

  The automated clearing house network took a crucial step toward faster transaction movement last Friday when NACHA, the network’s governing body, distributed a request for comment on a proposal for same-day settlement. NACHA sent the 22-page document, which sets out a proposed system called Expedited Processing and Settlement (EPS), …

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  It’s back to the future, and in many cases higher merchant-acceptance costs for transactions at or under $15, with the bank card networks’ new debit card interchange schedules that will take effect Saturday. That’s the same date that regulated interchange pricing under the Durbin Amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank …

  n While the development appears to give Isis a leg up on Google Inc., whose NFC initiative has so far been limited to a specific handset model from Samsung, observers point out that the mobile-operator joint venture is lagging behind in other respects. For example, Google recently announced the …

n Citing research from three Aite studies as well as interviews with 40 fraud-control vendors, Aite predicts that the amount of malware and losses from it are in for their own boom. Based on data from Panda Security, Aite senior analyst Julie Conroy McNelley estimates that 25 million new, unique …

In the course of a three-year legal war over a patent related to automated clearing house processing, LML Payment Systems Inc. has wrung at least $40.5 million out of some of North America’s biggest financial institutions, including Citigroup Inc., PayPal Inc., and HSBC Holdings PLC, and reinforced its claim on …

  Newspapers, television, and the Web are full of bleak assessments about the U.S. economy, but you wouldn’t know that from the latest financial and operating results reported by Discover Financial Services, the credit card issuer and student-loan provider that’s also the fourth-largest general-purpose credit card network. Discover card sales …

  n The San Francisco-based company, which is aiming its product at developers, in June released an iOS version for Apple Inc. devices. It says the software is now active on 80 applications, with another 750 having registered but not yet gone live. “Getting such a wide variety of apps …