Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals

Visa USA and payment-processing giant First Data Corp. on Wednesday announced a settlement in a 4-year-old legal dispute that apparently puts an end to First Data Net, a high-profile initiative of First Data's former top official, and also appears to set up FDC to receive payments from Visa to help …

PayPal Inc. will start rolling out its so-called virtual debit card to “hundreds of thousands” of users some time this month in a process it expects to complete by the end of August, a spokesperson for the San Jose, Calif.-based unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc. tells Digital Transactions News. …

Following a year of on-again, off-again speculation about its plans in online payments, Google Inc. launched a transaction service Thursday with at least 92 online merchants of various sizes already signed on, from Ace Hardware, Ritz Camera, and Buy.com to Trendy Togs and FaucetDirect. The new service, called Google Checkout, …

Some 74% of consumers would be willing to spend about $960 more per year on music, games, subscriptions, and other digital content online if they could use a form of payment that's safer and more convenient than a credit or debit card, a survey released Tuesday reveals. Given current estimates …

With the loss or theft of computerized personal information making headlines almost daily, lawmakers are scrambling for solutions for what is shaping up to be the 21st Century's hottest non-violent crime. More than a dozen bills that would put new requirements on banks and other entities with access to sensitive …

Some 1,000 Coca-Cola vending machines in Philadelphia will be equipped with contactless-payment technology over the next four weeks, and will all be accepting contactless tokens for payment by the end of July, according to USA Technologies Inc., the Malvern, Pa.-based company whose e-Port radio-frequency device is being used with the …

On the heels of an online-bill payment product it introduced last week that allows consumers to pay with credit cards, Yodlee Inc. on Tuesday introduced a Web-based tool that competes with personal-finance software and lets consumers pay bills and transfer funds. “We're capitalizing on the convergence between online banking and …

Some 34% of small merchants invest more in locking down products and cash in their stores than in securing customer data, while the proportion doing the opposite is one-fifth, according to survey results released Monday. In addition, though 64% of the merchants say they had taken steps within the last …

Wachovia Corp., some of whose debit card holders have been victimized by a data breach that happened several months ago, began sending notices and replacement cards to those customers recently because it began to see signs of fraud after months of monitoring the accounts, the bank says. Although Wachovia's action …

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest issuer of contactless credit cards in the country with 7 million in circulation, is now adding contactless payment technology to its debit cards. The banking giant, which brands its contactless cards “blink,” has plans to re-issue 1.8 million debit cards with the Visa mark …

Canadian police arrested 10 people Tuesday they say used rigged card terminals to intercept PINs as cardholders entered them at the point of sale as part of a scheme in which they stole $4 million (Canadian) from 18,000 customer bank accounts. More arrests are expected, according to the authorities. In …

Armed with $15 million in new venture capital, San Francisco-based Xoom Corp. is embarking on the next phase of its growth plan: selling Internet-based money-transfer services to banks, retailers and smaller money-transfer operators (MTOs) that can put their own brands on them and sell them to consumers. Founded in 2002, …

With online search giant Google Inc. reportedly a week away from launching its long-expected payment service, observers differ on the question of whether the service will allow merchants to accept electronic payments on their own sites or be limited to Google's own platforms, especially the rapidly growing Google Base online …

The number of unique phishing attacks and the population of Web sites involved in the online fraud both hit all-time highs in May, following a disturbing trend of dramatic month-to-month increases since late 2005, according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Reports of unique attacks?discrete e-mail blasts sent to consumers by …

Transaction Network Services Inc., which is routing wireless card transactions for Pepsi Co. at 500 vending machines, plans to boost that count to 10,000 machines across the country in 2007. TNS executives tell Digital Transactions in a story for the upcoming July-August issue that higher transactions tickets are helping to …

Merchants' sluggishness in achieving compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) is a source of some frustration to vendors like LaGarde Inc., but Michael Levin, executive vice president of marketing and business development for the Olathe, Kan.-based marketer of shopping-cart software for e-commerce, doesn't see the pace picking …

Hoping to process a growing volume of bill payments customers make in its 76 stores, Verizon Communications Inc. is installing a new point-of-sale system that when complete will speed up check transactions, offer customers real-time payment posting, and allow the telecommunications giant to archive transaction information from multiple payment forms, …

BidPay.com Inc., an online auction-payment processor that was shut down in December by owner First Data Corp., went live again this week with new pricing, international sales support, and a strategy to appeal to sellers by offering protection against certain chargebacks. The re-launch follows the March 2006 acquisition of BidPay …

Online retailers have long deployed front-end screening systems to check card-not-present transactions for fraud. A new software product announced Tuesday, however, is apparently the first commercially available product to automate what is now a heavily manual process of checking orders that don't pass these screens and yet are not unambiguously …

Think of electronic bill payments and, not surprisingly, the Internet usually comes to mind first. But many billers, especially banks, have yet to offer bill payments through telephone-based customer-service systems or automated interactive voice-response units, experts tell Digital Transactions magazine in an upcoming story on expedited bill payments. The Web's …