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Universal Air Travel Plan's alternative-payments initiative added a fifth processor this week with the announcement that Acculynk Inc. will process PIN debit transactions online for airlines that choose to enable the option through UATP's switch. The news not only further's UATP's 3-year-old effort to add alternatives to credit cards for …
Read More »Commercial in ’09. Visa Alerts Will Include Two-Way Messaging
Visa Inc., which on Monday announced a pilot project to deliver transaction alerts to cardholders' mobile phones and e-mail inboxes, expects to launch the service some time next year as a commercial service for its members, Visa executives say. While the pilot, which involves eight banks in the U.S. and …
Read More »The Coming PCI Update: Mostly Tweaks, but WEP Gets Whacked
The PCI Security Standards Council on Monday unveiled a preview of its soon-to-be-released Version 1.2 of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, an update the council's boss says adds no major rules. The update also will clarify existing requirements in Version 1.1, eliminate redundancies, and in general try to bring …
Read More »If You’re a Small Bank, the Trend Is Your Friend in Electronic Payments
This is the fourth installment of a six-part series exploring the growing economic tensions and structural conflicts between acquirers and issuers in the bank card business. If you're a top-10 bank card issuer these days, the good times are looking increasingly tenuous; if you are one of the nation's 17,000 …
Read More »Debit Study: No-Surcharge, Rewards Get Hot, Contactless Cools off
ATM surcharges often make the news when they hit a sensitive threshold such as $3, but the flip side of the story is the growth of options banks and credit unions offer customers to avoid paying the fees. According to newly released results from the Pulse electronic funds transfer network's …
Read More »JPMorgan Offers Insurers a Prepaid Visa Card for Workers’ Comp
The movement by card issuers and government entities to replace check-based benefit payments with prepaid cards entered a new category this week with JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s announcement it will issue a Visa card backed by workers' compensation funds. Unlike unemployment compensation, child-support payments, and other benefits that have backed …
Read More »Shift to Discount Stores Hurts First Data, But New Products Await
Merchant transaction volume increased by a healthy 11% at processor First Data Corp. in the second quarter, but a marked shift by consumers toward debit cards and spending at big discounters lowered margins at the card industry's biggest processor. Debit's growth has been outpacing credit's for years, but in a …
Read More »Industry Insiders Say Billing Gaining Ground for Mobile Content Payments
A survey of about 100 mobile and broadband executives indicates the wireless bill is rapidly gaining support as a vehicle for handling payments for digital-content downloads to mobile devices in the U.S. But at the same time the executives expressed doubts about the prospects for payments via near-field communication (NFC) …
Read More »ATM Network MoneyPass Quietly Books a Slew of New Members
The Allpoint and Co-op surcharge-free ATM networks are bigger, but Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp's MoneyPass network has been on a quiet growth spurt in 2008. MoneyPass over the spring and summer has announced a number of new members and in October is set to boost its ATM count by another 3,000 …
Read More »Cardtronics Looks to Market Its In-House Processing Platform
With its U.S. operations holding up despite the economic slowdown, non-bank ATM network operator Cardtronics Inc. is eyeing opportunities as a third-party ATM processor. Cardtronics executives said at a conference call with analysts on Tuesday morning that the conversion of the network's nearly 33,000 ATMs to a new in-house processing …
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