Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

After about two years of lackluster growth, e-checks at the point of sale started popping in the second quarter, according to new statistics from NACHA?The Electronic Payments Association. Sources tell Digital Transactions News that the force behind POP's sudden popularity is none other than Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest …

How much money financial institutions are making on their ATMs depends very much on where the machines are deployed, but in any case machine margins for banks and independent sales organizations alike are under pressure, forcing deployers to change how they view the technology. That's among findings contained in a …

July was a month of mixed news on the online-fraud front, as the number of unique reports of phishing attacks dropped 17% from June, to 23,670, but the population of Web sites hosting attacks ballooned 41%, to a record 14,191, according to the latest numbers from the Anti-Phishing Working Group, …

The creation of the new PCI Security Standards Council LLC by the five leading payment card brands represents a big step forward in enhancing credit and debit card security, but it doesn't go far enough, one analyst tells Digital Transactions News. The council, a creation of American Express Co., Visa …

In a deal on which the two parties spent the weekend hammering out final details, Discover Financial Services LLC and Global Payments Inc. on Monday said Global would take over processing and other acquiring functions on Discover transactions with merchants for which Global processes Visa USA and MasterCard Worldwide transactions. …

A nine-month trial of contactless payments using near-field communication (NFC) technology in Atlanta ended this week with what its participants are calling positive results, including an apparently enthusiastic reception from the pilot's 150 users. Meanwhile, the results of the Atlanta pilot may be spurring banks, the bank card networks, handset …

Looking to make inroads in the U.S. mobile-commerce market, Valista Ltd. has launched a hosted version of its payments-gateway product and has aimed it squarely at mobile operators hoping to cash in on the trend toward so-called off-deck transactions. The payments-software vendor, based in Dublin, Ireland, and in San Mateo, …

The new organization set up by the leading payment card networks to administer the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data-security rules should lead to closer coordination on security matters among card networks, merchants, and vendors, according to one of the organization's spokesmen. Announced Thursday, the organization has already issued an update …

The U.S. person-to-person payments business, including P2P payments on cell phones, attracted yet another entrant with the announcement Tuesday by BankServ Inc. that it had acquired the managed-payments platform of Magex Holdings Ltd., a U.K. company, for an undisclosed sum. In the deal, San Francisco-based BankServ, a 10-year-old private company …

Bowing to merchant pressure, MasterCard Inc. said Tuesday it will publish its U.S. interchange rates on its Web site and cap interchange fees on certain gasoline purchases. The moves, which will include the first time either of the two major bank card associations has published its interchange rates publicly, follow …

As an e-commerce payment system being developed for the automated clearing house nears a pilot scheduled for early next year, it may confront an old issue that sank an earlier such project: the potential for lost credit card sales online. That's according to an in-depth story on the ACH and …

China, India, and other high-growth payments markets get a lot of attention nowadays, but leading U.S.-based payment-terminal marketer VeriFone Holdings Inc. still sees plenty of opportunity close to home. San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone's aggressive focus on North America comes even as its pending acquisition of Israel-based rival Lipman Electronic Engineering …

Contactless payments loom large among rising challenges now confronting even the most dominant processors in the U.S. merchant-acquiring business, according to a new study. The report estimates that acquirers processed 45.5 billion credit, prepaid, and signature-debit transactions in 2005, a huge electronic transactions market it says is controlled by five …

It doesn't go live until next March 16, yet the new back-office conversion (BOC) electronic-check payment option already is attracting a good deal of interest from payment processors and their customers looking to reduce volumes of paper checks and speed customer service. “We believe this new conversion code will definitely …

In the Federal Reserve Board's final rule that extends Regulation E provisions to the fast-growing payroll card sector, electronic transaction reporting won out over paper statements, but issuers may take on added risk with a longer time period for dispute resolution, experts say. After a two-year process that involved taking …

Canadian police have made seven arrests as part of a continuing investigation into what might be a terrorist-connected scheme to skim PINs and other credit and debit card information from a point-of-sale terminal. The case, which has affected residents of Mississauga, a town near Toronto, involved a handheld terminal at …

Phishing hit record levels in June, according to new numbers released this week by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, though the group cautions that the increase was caused in large part by new data sources that drove up the sample size. The number of unique reports of phishing attacks hit 28,571 …

A Michigan convenience-store chain believes its new Debitman card program will lower its card-acceptance costs while simultaneously boosting customer loyalty by taking some of the sting out of rising gasoline prices. Debitman Card Inc. announced this week that Muskegon-based Wesco Inc., which operates 51 stores in the state, would join …

Visa USA reported Thursday an increasing willingness among consumers to use cards for purchases valued at under $25, a highly coveted transaction segment in which the San Francisco-based bank card network waives its signature requirement in some 17 merchant categories. The network says its payment volume in this segment jumped …

My Payment Network Inc., a Corte Madera, Calif.-based startup specializing in invoice-based electronic-payment processing for schools and small businesses, says its SchoolPay product could reach between 3,500 and 4,000 schools in the coming year, up from more than 50 at the end of the 2005-06 academic year. At the same …