Canada's Interac Association debit network is teaming with France-based semiconductor manufacturer Inside Contactless in a partnership that will include a test next year that will pair PIN-based debit cards with contactless payments. But to keep transactions moving quickly, cardholders will not need to enter a PIN. The test will be …
Read More »Eye on ISOs: Wooing Merchants Harder, Plus an ECR Giveaway
Acquirers and independent sales organizations have plenty of opportunity to build transaction volume with merchants despite the economic downturn. They just need to work harder at incentives for merchants to accept cards instead of cash or checks and on satisfying merchant needs, according to a new research report released Wednesday …
Read More »Eye on M-Commerce: Apple’s App Store Traffic Hits 1.5 Billion Downloads
While experts debate when mobile commerce will hit its stride, Apple Inc. announced on Tuesday that its App Store, which it set up just one year ago, has downloaded more than 1.5 billion applications for the company's hugely popular iPhone handset. The App Store had just hit the 1 billion …
Read More »Online Bill Pay Gains 1.3 Million Households in ‘Generational Change’
More than 2 million new households logged into online banking over the past year, bringing the online-banking share of the nation's households with Internet access to 79%. That's one of the key findings from the 2009 Consumer Billing and Payment Trends survey from bank processor and bill-pay technology provider Fiserv …
Read More »Security Experts Start to Look at Data Encryption for Smart Phones
As the momentum behind mobile payments gathers strength, some technology experts are starting to consider so-called smart phones?which make mobile payments easy?to be devices in need of encryption. That's one finding in an annual study out Monday about encryption, a hot topic in the payment card industry nowadays because of …
Read More »An Information Gap Sparks a Dust-Up over Remote Key Injection
Is MasterCard Inc. putting the kibosh on a new technology called remote key injection that makes it easier to enhance the security of point-of-sale payment terminals? That's the impression some payments executives got after reading an online Computerworld article Wednesday that said MasterCard was insisting on manual injection of security …
Read More »How Verient Combines Security And Customization in Cards
Verient Inc. is the startup behind SafeDebit, NYCE Payments Network LLC's effort to allow consumers to use their NYCE cards on the Internet (Digital Transactions News, July 2), but the company's ambitions go well beyond enabling debit-based e-commerce. By the end of the year, it expects to have between 3,000 …
Read More »PayPal Denies Adaptive Payments API Is a Ploy to ‘Crush’ Amazon FPS
PayPal Inc. is planning to launch a flexible-payments application programming interface that will allow merchants and others to build their own payment systems, but the company denies that the Adaptive Payments API is a response to Amazon.com Inc.'s Flexible Payments Service, which has been available as a commercial product for …
Read More »A 7-Eleven Anti-Interchange Petition ‘Touches a Nerve’
7-Eleven Inc. has gathered between 1 million and 1.2 million signatures on in-store petitions asking Congress to regulate interchange rates, and expects to have 3 million customer signatures by the time the petition drive ends Aug. 10, according to an executive with the Dallas-based convenience-store chain. The response, says Keith …
Read More »MPX, Payments Central Merge in Latest ACH Consolidation Move
The slow but steady pace of consolidation of regional automated clearing house associations continued this week when Kansas City, Mo.-based Mid-America Payment Exchange (MPX) merged with Columbus, Ohio-based Payments Central. The new entity, dubbed Epcor, serves more than 2,300 financial institutions in all or parts of 12 states stretching from …
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