Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

The mysterious Square Inc. payment service made a name for itself Monday by joining a somewhat exclusive club of companies to offer the first applications for Apple Inc.'s iPad notepad computer within a couple of days of the iPad's much-hyped April 3 debut. Square also revealed its pricing. San Francisco-based …

In an example of how fast news can spread in the over heated atmosphere of mobile payments, news items and blog postings appeared on Monday and Tuesday suggesting that Apple Inc. is angling to buy Vivotech Inc., a vendor of hardware and software for contactless payments. At the same time, …

Transaction Network Services Inc. this week announced its entry in what is becoming an increasingly crowded market?applications that let smart phones act as credit and debit card acceptance devices. But TNS, which specializes in providing the transaction-transport systems for point-of-sale and ATM networks, says it will set itself apart by …

Consumer usage of prepaid and gift cards declined last year, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research. Javelin estimates that the percentage of U.S. adults who had used a prepaid or gift card in the preceding 12 months fell from 66% in 2008 to 61% in 2009. …

The 20-year sentence imposed last week on Albert Gonzalez of Miami, the computer hacker who led the attack on Heartland Payment Systems, TJX Cos., and other major retailers, won't deter future data breaches, a security expert says. Gonzalez, leader of the largest hacking and identity-theft ring ever prosecuted by the …

The jury verdict rendered Friday in favor of a small software company that says big banks and processors are trampling on its electronic-check patents may have boosted that company's cause but it hardly brings down the curtain on what has been a costly legal marathon for the payments industry. “We're …

A year-long conversion of the old fare-collection systems used by monthly-ticket customers of multiple transit agencies in San Diego County, Calif., to a unified system based on contactless cards is nearing completion, a local official tells Digital Transactions News. The new system, from San Diego-based Cubic Transportation Systems Inc., will …

Banking-services provider Fiserv Inc. announced on Monday a free widget that will let banks readily create a simplified bill-payment function on the so-called landing page of their online-banking sites. The widget, which starting some time in the second quarter will also enable person-to-person payments, is a piece of code that …

Meeting the Aug. 22 deadline for complying with new rules for prepaid and gift cards released on Wednesday by the Federal Reserve will be a logistical nightmare for card companies and retailers that have to replace hundreds of millions of cards before the 2010 holiday shopping season, according to a …

Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc.'s sales force will begin selling the company's new end-to-end encryption system in the second quarter following testing that began last June, the company says. Heartland also says several terminal manufacturers are integrating the technological protocols of its system, which was developed by Voltage Security …

The concept of an all-digital check, which surfaced in a paper published in November by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, could move from theory to reality in a matter of months now that a technology startup in Atlanta has won a pair of patents covering applications of the idea. …

Competition in the bill-to-carrier mobile payments market is heating up with Verizon Wireless's announcement it will offer the service directly to consumers through Danal Inc.'s BilltoMobile payment service within the next few weeks. The deal marks Seoul, Korea-based mobile payments operator Danal's first contract in the U.S. Danal is in …

News about the latest developments in the hot mobile-payments sector is coming from some familiar sources, such as Wells Fargo & Co. and Visa Inc., and some unlikely ones, such as the state of Arkansas. Wells Fargo is rolling out Visa's text-message and e-mail alert service that lets credit card …

Growing independent sales organization FrontStream Payments Inc. made another deal last week that could be a sign that merger-and-acquisition activity in the merchant-acquiring industry is warming up after a recession-induced chill. The transaction also illustrates that private-equity firms see the merchant-acquiring space as a fertile ground for new investments. In …

The merchant-acquirer encryption and tokenization train picked up speed this week when Fifth Third Processing Solutions, one of the nation's biggest payment processors, announced it would offer its merchants end-to-end encryption and tokenization systems for protecting cardholder data. Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Processing's technology comes from Voltage Security Inc., the Palo …

More online shoppers are repudiating transactions even after they've received their merchandise, much to the chagrin of online merchants, which are focusing on the problem as they seldom have in the past. That's according to Robert W. Botelle, executive vice president for merchant services and chief customer officer at Litle …

Discover Financial Services now has more than 100 bank card merchant acquirers booking small to medium-sized merchants for its network, the company reported today at an investor presentation in New York City. Discover predicts that those acquirers will enable Discover acceptance in 97% of their new merchant sales in 2010's …

With the economy still shaky, some established online merchants are branching into new product lines in search of incremental revenue, and that can create problems if the merchants don't work closely with their acquirers, Bob Nadeau, group executive at Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, tells Digital Transactions News. In a wide-ranging …

First Data Corp., which for the past couple of years has been pushing its Go Tag contactless-sticker technology, announced on Tuesday it will promote a new contactless technology for mobile phones based on Secure Digital memory cards. But the massive Atlanta-based processor says the move will have no impact on …

Interchange regulation of the kind being advocated by national merchant groups just isn't getting much traction on Capitol Hill. In the latest example, the National Retail Federation on Monday issued a statement saying it was disappointed that U.S. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd's much-awaited proposal for regulatory reform in …