American Express Co. on Thursday announced it will pay approximately $150 million to buy a software startup in suburban Chicago whose product lets online merchants automate order screening for fraud. Founded in 2007, Accertify Inc. has built a client base that includes Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, and 1800 Flowers …

Payments companies ranging from leading merchant processors to prepaid card and ATM managers reported transaction growth in the third quarter, but some also faced pricing pressures and other drags on the bottom line. –No. 1 payment processor First Data Corp. said transactions in its merchant-processing unit called Retail and Alliance …

MasterCard Inc.’s latest debit numbers seem to indicate the network is going backwards while bigger rival Visa Inc. is racking up 20% gains. But MasterCard executives say the company’s underlying debit card trends are positive and will start showing up in the operational reports next year. MasterCard on Tuesday reported …

Secure Vault Payments (SVP), a method of e-commerce payment that relies on the automated clearing house, secured its first big-bank supporter on Wednesday with the announcement that U.S. Bank has agreed to offer the service to both consumer and merchant clients. The fifth largest bank in the country, the Minneapolis-based …

With a freshly revised version of industry rules for payment card data security having just emerged (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 28), further evidence is also surfacing of the compliance challenge acquirers face with the smallest merchants. Indeed, the smaller the business, the less sensitive it is to the possibility of …

Banks, billers, and processors seeking to boost electronic bill-payment usage would do well to cast their lot with young, affluent consumers who are heavy users of smart phones, according to new research from Aite Group LLC. This cohort, whom Aite dubs “smartphonatics,” accounts for just 7% of consumers but make …

The specter of regulation cast a pall of uncertainty over Visa Inc.’s latest financials, but the U.S. operating statistics the world’s largest payment network reported on Wednesday bespoke a transaction machine shifting in high, or least a higher, gear. U.S. debit card payments volume broke the trillion-dollar mark in fiscal …

The new version 2.0 of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) came out Thursday, an upgrade the PCI Security Standards Council says contains no major changes. Still, a document summarizing all the tweaks to the major card networks' common set of data-protection rules runs 20 pages in length. Among …

With competition heating up in the market for person-to-person payments, Fiserv Inc. reports its 3-month-old ZashPay service is making headway with client financial institutions. The service now claims some 400,000 registered users, while more than 400 banks and credit unions have signed on to offer it, with 100 of those …

PayPal Inc. took another step toward the physical point of sale on Tuesday with the announcement that it will work with VeriFone Systems Inc. to let merchants accept PayPal payments on VeriFone’s PAYware Mobile application. Starting early next year, merchants will be able take PayPal from customers on the application, …