The message this week from the top brass at American Express Co. is: Times are bad, but no worse at AmEx than elsewhere in the payments industry. American Express, the third-largest payment card network, is still making money, though a lot less of it: $172 million in the fourth quarter, …

Credit losses at Bill Me Later Inc. are manageable despite the economic downdraft of the past year, officials at eBay Inc. told analysts recently. The Timonium, Md.-based provider of so-called transactional credit for online transactions, which eBay bought last year and paired with its PayPal online-payments unit (Digital Transactions News, …

Nearly one week after news emerged of the big data breach at Princeton, N.J.-based merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc., it remains unclear how much damage actually happened and who did it. One report suggests Heartland's breach-related legal liabilities could approach $98 million, an estimate a Heartland spokesperson dismisses as …

This is the fourth installment of a six-part series exploring the impact of Web 2.0 on the payments business. Previous articles have dealt with the transition from the first generation of eCommerce to the emerging world of social networks and highly personalized interactions utilizing Web 2.0 technology. Consumers will be …

As merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. and federal investigators continue to probe the data breach Heartland disclosed on Tuesday, evidence is building that banks and credit unions around the country are reissuing cards on a mass scale as a likely result of the breach. That could give credence to …

The rapidly mounting popularity of a technology that lets businesses process checks by turning them into electronic images for deposit is giving rise to new methods that promise to relieve small businesses of the need to have either traditional check scanners or processing software. The latest example is a product …

Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. reported on Tuesday that it has found malicious software on its processing system, the result of a breach that happened in 2008 but which Heartland says is now contained. The malware captured an unknown quantity of card numbers and expiration dates along with a …

The latest credit card charge-volume figures from the nation's top three banks show big declines, portending weak results when other issuers, merchant acquirers, and Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. report their fourth-quarter earnings in coming days. On Friday, Bank of America Corp. reported fourth-quarter purchase volume of $56.6 billion on …

Interchange, the most controversial part of credit and debit card pricing, is the subject of a background paper MasterCard Inc. posted on its Web site last week, just ahead of the inauguration on Tuesday of a new president and his administration. A MasterCard spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News the document …

This is the third installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 developments are likely to transform the payments business. The online marketplace is morphing to payments embedded in top-line oriented-marketing services, and integrated infrastructure where small retailers can share the scale and cost savings of bigger players. Both …