Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Facing financial markets that have been roiled by troubled subprime mortgages and a weakening economy, Visa Inc. on Monday said it is seeking to raise $15 billion to $17 billion in its upcoming initial public offering of common stock?an amount that even on the low end would be a record …

With potential buyers so far proving to be no more than tire kickers, bankrupt biometrics payment company Solidus Networks Inc., which does business as Pay By Touch, is looking to sell itself in separate auctions of what it calls its core and non-core assets. The core assets center on Pay …

Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …

Contactless payment took another step forward in the mass-transit market with the announcement on Thursday by two key New York City-area transportation agencies that they will run a pilot of MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass system next year. The Port Authority will install contactless readers at 40 turnstiles in all 13 of …

Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …

Walk-in bill-payment provider IPP of America Inc. on Tuesday announced it had raised $20.5 million from three institutional investors, capital that will enable the fast-growing company to expand its physical presence and add more billers to its network. The investment also represents the first round of venture-capital financing arranged by …

A potent new technique that phishing fraudsters have started using to thwart efforts to shut down their bogus Web sites has inspired a panel at the Anti-Phishing Working Group to hammer out a new policy that would get domain registries to disable criminal sites. The new policy, called the domain …

Getting financial institutions and telecommunications providers to agree on major issues related to mobile payments is one of the most difficult problems faced by the nascent mobile-payments industry. Nonetheless, some banks want to plant a stake on the mobile-payments turf early, as evidenced by the announcement this week that Citigroup …

With its announcement on Thursday that it is working with a U.K. provider to enable mobile access to credit card accounts in the U.S., Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has joined rival payments processors First Data Corp. and Metavante Corp. in entering the nascent but highly promising business of mobile …

Electronic-payment security experts predicted fraudsters would turn their attention to less-guarded telephone-based banking systems as a result of banks' efforts to beef up online-banking security in the wake of federal regulations promulgated in 2005. Now comes a new study about identity fraud, which, while not showing a causal relationship, gives …

In an effort related to a broader initiative to tighten risk management in the automated clearing house network, NACHA this week announced its voting membership has approved a rule that requires companies that originate transactions to identify themselves with names their customers will recognize. The new rule, which goes into …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp. on Monday said it is talking with France-based Ingenico about the $332 million buyout offer Ingenico made last week, an offer that came at a time when Phoenix, Ariz.-based Hypercom is trying to buy the POS terminal unit of another French company, Thales S.A. Ingenico …

LendingTools.com, a Wichita-Kansas-based technology company that a year ago began offering regional image exchanges for community banks based on an ASP model, says it is processing items at a rate of 10 million per month, with more growth in store in 2008. As smaller banks leave paper-check exchanges and begin …

Visa Inc., which is planning an initial public stock offering this year, processed 9.1 billion transactions in its fiscal 2008 first quarter ended Dec. 31, up 1.1 billion or 13% from 8 billion a year earlier, according to the quarterly report the No. 1 payment network filed Feb. 4 with …

Merchants like to gripe about the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) nearly as much as they like to complain about interchange, but a new set of questionnaires for merchants to use with their PCI assessments could reduce the irritation factor. The new, so-called Self Assessment Questionnaire from the PCI …

In a major vote of confidence for an 11-month-old form of electronic payment, Hy-Vee Inc., a 224-unit supermarket chain based in West Des Moines, Iowa, has installed back-office conversion (BOC) in 21 of its stores in the Des Moines area since last August and plans to roll out the system …

Three months after Wachovia Corp. began offering a mobile-banking service based on a software application installed in customers' handsets (Digital Transactions News, Nov. 13, 2007), the Charlotte, N.C.-based banking company is seeing new enrollments in the service rise at an average of 40% per week, while 10% of enrollments have …

Remote deposit capture still has plenty of territory to conquer in its original business-user market, but bank processor Fiserv Inc.'s CheckFree electronic bill-pay unit on Tuesday unveiled a home-based remote deposit capture service it believes will tap growing consumer demand for electronic banking. Dubbed Remote Deposit Capture for Consumers, the …

An absence of incentives?particularly for merchants?is handicapping contactless payments in the U.S., and by extension mobile payment at the point of sale could suffer, according to a new report. About 40,000 U.S. merchants now accept contactless cards and fobs, or 0.5% of all merchant locations. That number will grow to …

PayPal Inc.'s rapidly growing payment volume, coupled with its increasing penetration of markets not related to its mainline eBay Inc. business, led to the e-commerce processor's announcement this week that it had agreed to buy an Israeli technology firm, Fraud Sciences Ltd., for $169 million in cash. PayPal says the …