It's now official: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has become a major distributor of walk-in electronic bill-payment services. Processor Fiserv Inc. announced that 3,755 U.S. Wal-Mart locations now offer standard and next-day bill payments from Fiserv's CheckFreePay service. The service enables customers to pay 2,500 utility, credit card, phone, insurance, and other …

As bills paid the old-fashioned way–through the mail–decline while online bill payments boom, a Digital Transactions News analysis of recent automated clearing house data shows Internet-based e-check traffic approaching transaction volumes of check conversions for conventional bill payments. At the current rate, the Web-based payments could surpass these paper-based check …

The merchant-acquiring industry can expect more market consolidation and more attention to security, and it also will have to adjust to the secular shift away from credit and toward debit, according to a new assessment of market trends from Mercator Advisory Group Inc. Portfolio sales and acquisitions of smaller processors …

An application officially announced this week extends to virtually any cell phone the capability of accepting credit cards, a function that up to now mobile merchants have found mostly restricted to so-called smart phones like the iPhone or BlackBerry. The wCharge Credit Card Terminal, quietly introduced early this year by …

This week's indictment of the alleged criminal mastermind behind the biggest and most notorious data breaches the card industry has ever sustained isn't likely to deter others from stealing card information. Indeed, merchants and processors counting on the charges brought on Monday against Albert Gonzalez (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 17) …

Stunning indictments announced on Monday by the U.S. attorney in New Jersey against three defendants for the first time reveal the number of credit and debit card numbers stolen in the Heartland Payment Systems Inc. data breach: 130 million. That confirms speculation that Heartland's was the biggest card hack ever. …

Bank technology provider Jack Henry & Associates Inc. on Monday said it would buy Goldleaf Financial Solutions Inc. in a $19.1 million cash deal that will bring two of the leading deployers of remote deposit capture services under one roof. The pending acquisition will be Monett, Mo.-based Jack Henry's 17th …

Merchants increasingly are complaining about the rising cost of accepting PIN-debit transactions, once by far the cheapest payment they could process from any piece of plastic. Now, data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City show why: the cost of accepting PIN-debit cards rose 305% between 1996 and …

The severity and length of the recession makes it likely banks will be able to raise fees for last-minute online bill payments, recent research says. That will mean more revenue for financial institutions that have been seeking ways to make money from electronic bill payments, a service they've generally been …

The end-to-end encryption train picked up steam on Tuesday when big merchant acquirer RBS WorldPay Inc. said it would use point-of-sale terminal developer VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s VeriShield Protect technology. The announcement is significant because RBS WorldPay is the first acquirer to publicly disclose it is using the system VeriFone unveiled …