Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The good news about identity fraud: dollar losses per incident are going down. The bad news: incidents are up. The bad news for merchants: fraud victims, especially young adults, will punish merchants they associate with ID fraud. And some bad news for the payments industry in general: more ID fraud …
Read More »It’s Hunker-Down Time for the Bank Card Networks
If the flow of recessionary credit card spending could be likened to the Niagara River, MasterCard Inc. has gone over the falls while Visa is still just upstream at Grand Island. MasterCard on Thursday reported fourth-quarter drops of nearly 10% in U.S. credit card purchase volume and more than 6% …
Read More »Amazon Launches Flexible Payments As a Commercial Service
Eighteen months after introducing it to developers as a beta project (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 6, 2007), Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday commercially launched its Flexible Payments Service (FPS) as the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of alternative-payment engines that includes industry giants PayPal Inc. and Google Inc. The …
Read More »NACHA Group Close to Proposals for Mobile Payments on the ACH
A group that has been investigating possible rules changes for the automated clearing house network to account for mobile payments plans to present its proposals by the end of March, according to a senior executive at NACHA, the organization that regulates the ACH. The Mobile Banking Work Group, a NACHA-sponsored …
Read More »RBS WorldPay Rocked by ATM Fraud As New CEO Takes the Helm
A new chief executive has taken over at merchant processor RBS WorldPay Inc. just as news erupted this week of a major worldwide ATM fraud that relied on card data stolen from the processor's system last year. Ian Stuttard took the helm of the Atlanta-based company, a unit of Royal …
Read More »Court: AmEx Can’t Use Arbitration To Thwart Merchant Class Actions
A three-judge panel for the federal appellate court in New York reversed a lower court by ruling Friday that the arbitration provision in American Express Co. merchant agreements that requires merchants to give up their right to participate in class-action lawsuits against AmEx, or even to challenge the company as …
Read More »ISO First American Seeks Early Mover Advantage with Remote Capture
Further evidence that independent sales organizations are mobilizing to sell Check 21-based electronic check processing to merchants emerged last week with First American Payments L.P.'s announcement that it will re-sell remote deposit services from RDM Corp., a Waterloo, Ontario-based vendor of electronic-check solutions. Fort Worth, Texas-based First American, which provides …
Read More »Can Facebook Grasp the Payments Opportunity Now in Front of It?
This is the fifth installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 is likely to transform the payments business. Prior articles focused on how new providers are leading the transition from the first generation of e-commerce, where a buyer had a one-way relationship with a seller's Web site and …
Read More »Pricing Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story About Merchant Attrition
Pricing is by far the biggest reason merchants cite when asked why they left their previous payment card processor, but there's more to the attrition story than meets the eye, according to a new study by Aite Group LLC. “Pricing is only the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back,” …
Read More »The Recession Is Sending Rates of Friendly Fraud Up, Processors Say
With the recession throwing more and more people out of work by the day, payments processors are reporting that their merchants are experiencing sharp increases in e-commerce chargebacks stemming from so-called friendly fraud. This is the fraud that results when a consumer repudiates a transaction as unauthorized in hopes of …
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