Kemesa LLC entered the war on online fraud on Monday with a product that allows consumers to pay e-commerce merchants using so-called anonymous data that would be useless to cyber thieves. The Aventura, Fla.-based startup says it plans to market the product to consumers through their financial institutions and is …

Faced with more stringent authentication procedures for online financial transactions, criminals are turning to call centers to commit fraud via the phone channel, according to RSA, the Security Division of EMC. Although call-center fraud still is a small percentage of total Internet fraud, it is “definitely growing,” says Joram Borenstein, …

If mobile-payments services are finding a niche anywhere right now, it appears to be in the market for digital goods like games and social-network applications. Palo Alto, Calf.-based Zong Inc., which began operations last year, announced this week that the processing platform it shares with its parent company, Echovox Inc., …

For years, more consumers have used biller sites rather than online-banking sites to pay their bills electronically. But now, with financial institutions struggling to build deposits, bank sites have edged ahead, according to research released on Wednesday by Javelin Strategy & Research. At the same time, though, it appears some …

As PayPal Inc. recovers from a major?and apparently unprecedented?system outage on Monday, questions are starting to emerge about the actual impact on online merchants and about the e-commerce processor's preparedness for such emergencies. PayPal reported late in the day that its network was functioning normally again after the failure of …

A record decline in same-store sales and a $19.4 million charge for costs related to its data breach put big merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. into the red during the second quarter. But Heartland executives on Tuesday pointed to bright spots, and also said their post-breach efforts to develop …

Profits and overall transaction volumes are still growing for Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., but the bank card networks' latest quarterly numbers show just how severe the cutback by recession-racked credit card issuers is becoming. In fact, there are about 104 million fewer credit cards circulating in the U.S. today …

As the recession continues to batter merchants of all sizes, small and medium-size retailers are getting hit especially hard, and as a result so are the acquirers that process their card transactions. Indeed, in a development apparently never seen before, same-store sales on Visa and MasterCard for these Main Street …

Banks face a new threat in electronic payments, according to a report just out from Javelin Strategy and Research: the ability of telecommunications companies to take the driver's seat in mobile person-to-person payments. This risk comes to the fore as the number of so-called smart phones explodes and consumers show …

Mitek Systems Inc., whose software allows users to create check images with their camera phones and then use the handsets to send the images to banks for deposit, signed its biggest processor to date this week for the six-month-old technology. Milwaukee-based Fiserv Inc. agreed to adopt Mitek's Mobile Deposit product …