Most payments startups focusing on mobile commerce these days are relying on either direct debit or carrier billing to handle funds transfers. But Billing Revolution, a 2-year-old Seattle-based company, is marketing a system that lets consumers buy products on their handsets with a single click, and charge their transactions to …

Having lost one brawl with Congress this year over credit cards, big banks apparently are in no mood to fight about another increasingly political issue, overdraft fees. Leading debit card issuers Bank of America Corp. on Tuesday and JPMorgan Chase & Co. on Wednesday announced major changes to their overdraft-fee …

In the wake of a patent award announced this week, a top Tyfone Inc. executive says the company expects to have what it calls a “scalable” platform built by the middle of next year for a contactless mobile-payments system based on Secure Digital memory cards that fit into handsets. “The …

A new data-security service announced on Tuesday by heavyweight players in payment processing and data security?First Data Corp. and EMC Corp.'s RSA unit, known as The Security Division of EMC?is expected to boost a technology called tokenization, the replacement of cardholder account numbers with surrogate numbers or “tokens.” Since the …

The rules-setting body of the automated clearing house plans to classify mobile ACH transactions under the existing WEB code rather than create a new code for such payments, at least for the short term. Mobile payments could get their own code some time after 2010. Those ideas are part of …

Merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations are paying about 10% less for authorization and back-end transaction processing services than they did in 2007, according to new study by The Strawhecker Group. But, not surprisingly, big acquirers get the best pricing, and new clients of service providers are getting better deals …

Merchants turned up the heat on banks and the bank card networks on Thursday by releasing a report showing that interchange fees in the U.S are much higher than in other countries, and arguing that policymakers in the U.S. should regulate interchange as have their counterparts overseas. “We want to …

Retailers have complained the loudest about the cost of complying with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, but comments Tuesday at a health-care payments conference indicate that medical providers also incur considerable expense to secure their card-accepting payment systems. PCI-related costs come to about $100,000 a year for …

Google Inc. has apparently fixed a weeks-old problem with its Google Checkout online-payments system that prevented merchants from processing recurring transactions, such as subscription fees. While Google says the little-publicized glitch affected only a small number of merchants, other observers say this and outages experienced by other alternative payment services?such …

Dozens of U.S. grocery-store chains added credit card acceptance in the 1990s, when consumers began asking to use the cards and merchant acquirers saw a ripe new market. Grocers acquiesced to keep their customers happy and because the payment card networks offered interchange breaks or other incentives. But not Aldi, …