Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Visa USA's chief executive on Wednesday outlined a multimarket strategy for prepaid cards, while announcing that convenience-store titan 7-Eleven Inc. has joined Visa's fledgling prepaid reload network and calling for greater efforts to educate regulators about the unique characteristics of prepaid plastic. “There's an incredible opportunity [in the prepaid market],” …

Hackers frequently go free, but Coventry, R.I., police late Monday night arrested four California men suspected in the recent theft of debit and credit card data from PIN pads at grocery-store chain Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos. While the arrests are certainly good news to Stop & Shop and banks, …

A startup processor on Monday launched a service intended to allow consumers to pay online merchants with cash. Retail Expansion Network Inc., Oakland, Calif., says its PaidByCash service will attract consumers who are reluctant to use credit cards online or who don't have bank accounts, and will be cheaper for …

Leading payment processor First Data Corp. said on Thursday it would gradually exit the money-order and official-check businesses, a move some analysts see as a landmark in the growth of prepaid cards and electronic bill payment by consumers lacking traditional bank accounts. “Money orders are in big trouble,” says research …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 8 From the way alternative-payment options are treated by the big players in the electronic- payments industry, you would think these options carried infectious diseases. Not long ago, a payments executive on the treasury side of a major national retailer lamented that …

Off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. on Wednesday divulged more information about the intrusion into its computer network that contained credit and debit card data, but one piece of information still eludes public disclosure: the actual number of accounts compromised. Earlier estimates put the figure as high as 40 million (Digital …

With consumer fees rapidly trending downward, expedited bill payment may be turning into more of a service to cement customer relationships than a source of revenue. Indeed, the median fee for the service is now zero, compared to $2.50 in 2005, according to survey research recently completed by Javelin Strategy …

Although many details remain unclear, a security breach at a big supermarket chain in the Northeast bears some resemblance to a sophisticated rigging of point-of-sale equipment to capture PINs and other card data last year in Canada. Quincy, Mass.-based Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos., which has 385 stores in New …

Some 16% of community banks offer remote deposit capture of checks to business customers, and nearly one-third of these say they have adopted the electronic check technology as “an essential survival strategy,” according to a survey released on Monday by the American Bankers Association. At the same time, 65% of …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 7 Bubbling like a witch's cauldron in the heart of the electronic payments industry's turmoil over signature cards is the strange and self-destructive contention between the two primary ways of getting funds out of your checking accounts with a bank card. Banks …

It's a classic corporate case of the tail wagging the dog. In particular, it's Comdata Corp., a payment processor and prepaid and fleet card provider that generates more than half the profits of its parent company, Bloomington, Minn.-based Ceridian Corp., even though it accounts for only 30% of the revenues. …

Merchants, card issuers, utilities, e-commerce operators, and other businesses looking to guard against identity fraud may want to take a closer look at applications coming from Floral Park, Queens, a part of New York City. They may also need to scrutinize new customers from Faulkton, S.D., population 800. That's because …

In a deal that continues a trend toward consolidation among tech companies in the payments industry, bill-payment services provider CheckFree Corp. on Wednesday announced that it plans to buy online-banking software maker Corillian Corp. for $245 million. The acquisition, which will produce a nice Valentine's Day windfall for Corillian shareholders, …

Discover Financial Services LLC on Tuesday reported that it would use Motorola Inc.'s M-Wallet technology for a test of contactless payments and account management using cellular phones. The pilot not only represents another step by Discover on its road to network-wide contactless payments, but it's also significant for Motorola, which …

Arguing that U.S. transaction processors face pressing needs for both capacity and faster rollout times for new payment methods, a San Mateo, Calif.-based software company specializing in so-called high-performance transaction-processing systems has begun courting merchant acquirers, processors, electronic funds transfer networks, and high-volume merchants for a recently released payments switch. …

Credit card industry veteran Joseph W, Saunders has resigned his position as president of card services at Washington Mutual Inc. to become executive chairman of Visa Inc., the entity Visa announced last fall as the planned publicly held company embodying all of its worldwide operating divisions except that for Europe …

Data breaches, including the recently disclosed hack at off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. (Digital Transactions News, Jan. 22), garner a lot of headlines, but they paint a misleading picture about the resulting dangers, according to some experts. While an estimated 30% of consumers have been exposed to data breaches, only …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 6 The venerable credit card has been, by most measures, the most successful retail financial-services product in the past half-century. But even die-hard proponents can in good conscience no longer deny the growing evidence that the market for signature-based credit cards has …

Despite concerns over the recent hack at retailer TJX Cos. Inc. and other data breaches, the head of the organization overseeing the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards is optimistic that card networks, merchants, and financial institutions are on the road to more secure payments. “Compliance is often a …

Image clearing of check payments is nearing 60% of all image-exchange volume, while the total volume of paper substitute-check volume cleared is now falling for the first time, lending credence to arguments by industry observers that conversion to end-to-end image clearing is proceeding more quickly than some bankers had thought. …