Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly Following a summer of uncertainty over whether millions of uninsured consumers would be unable to buy medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because they didn’t have a checking account, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this week issued a rule that requires …
Read More »USA Technologies Launches a Prepaid Loyalty Program for Vending Machines
Love your local vending machine and it’ll love you back. That’s the message from USA Technologies Inc. (USAT), operator of a wireless network of card-accepting vending machines. USAT this week unveiled a loyalty program called “More” centered around a proprietary, reloadable stored-value card that machine owners and operators can offer …
Read More »The PCI Council Wants To Get into Your Head with Its Pending Update to Security Standards
By Jim Daly The coming update to the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) will include new guidelines about physically protecting credit and debit card terminals, when third-party vendors share security responsibilities with merchants, protecting card data in a computer system’s short-term memory, and strengthening passwords, among others. The PCI …
Read More »Chase Paymentech Pursues Mobile Payments And More with New Service for Small Businesses
By Jim Daly The big merchant acquirer Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC on Tuesday announced a mobile-payments service that includes a reader that plugs into smart phones as part of a broader new service for small businesses called Chase Checkout. After testing the service in five states, Dallas-based Chase Paymentech quietly …
Read More »Court’s Overturning of the Fed’s Durbin Rule Resurrects ‘Alternative B’ for Routing
By Jim Daly B is back. That is, what the Federal Reserve Board back in 2011 dubbed “Alternative B” for implementing the transaction-routing requirements in the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment. Alternative B would have required each debit card to provide the merchant access to at least two signature and two …
Read More »VeriFone Brings Point to the U.S. as Part of a New, Managed-Payments Offering
More than 18 months after acquiring Point, a Sweden-based provider of payment gateway solutions to merchants, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. announced Monday that it will roll out the service to U.S. merchants beginning this fall. VeriFone intends to offer Point as a managed service through independent sales organizations …
Read More »Retailer-Owned MCX M-Payments Network Takes Shape with FIS As Processor
Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …
Read More »With EMV Looming, Fears of Rising Online Fraud Will Drive Biometrics, Expert Says
Biometric authentication will be in widespread use by financial institutions and online merchants by 2015, a payments-security expert predicts. “We’re at the threshold, it’s going to be common in the next year or so,” Al Pascual, a senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. Pascual forecasts …
Read More »Small Issuers See Durbin Impact on Interchange, Pulse Debit Study Indicates
The Durbin Amendment’s pricing caps are having an impact on small issuers as well as large, and issuers overall are far from bullish about debit-transaction growth, according to a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday. Issuers exempt from the law’s interchange cap report an average income of 45 cents per transaction …
Read More »Researcher Predicts Almost 90% of U.S. POS Terminals Will Be EMV-Capable by 2017
Nearly 90% of U.S. point-of-sale terminals will be ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by 2017, according to a new Aite Group LLC study. The report examines the reterminalization of card-acceptance locations triggered by the payment card networks’ plans announced in 2011 and 2012 to wean America off of …
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