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A provider of mobile-banking and ?payments software has begun promoting a memory card for cell phones that it says could allow financial institutions to move forward with contactless mobile payments without the need to work with wireless carriers. Portland Ore.-based Tyfone Inc., founded four years ago, is testing its Secure …
Read More »How U.S. Bank Hopes To Catch a Wave in Contactless Payments
Riding the swelling wave of issuer interest in contactless payment cards, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp this week launched a program to issue Visa Inc.'s payWave contactless cards on debit accounts in California, Colorado, Missouri, and Utah. The bank didn't say how many cards it plans to issue. Customers who already have …
Read More »Indiana Bank’s Debit Card Breach Underscores Issuer Vulnerability
South Bend, Ind.-based 1st Source Bank is reissuing its entire portfolio of debit cards after a hacker or hackers broke into a bank server containing debit card data. No fraud has been discovered as a result of the intrusion, a bank executive tells Digital Transactions News. The $4.5-billion-asset bank with …
Read More »New Electronic Benefit Options Score High in Michigan on First Day
The state of Michigan has joined a trend, developing for the past couple of years, toward replacing paper benefit checks with electronic payment. The state on Tuesday announced it has started offering debit cards and direct-deposit options to citizens eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA), which …
Read More »Researcher Sees Issuers’ Service Providers as PCI ‘Hot Spots’
Six specialty types of vendors, processors, and other service providers that card issuers use lack specific guidelines on how to protect cardholder data under the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, according to a recent report from research firm TowerGroup Inc. These service providers thus represent “hot spots” that …
Read More »A Senate Letter Ratchets up the Heat on Networks over Interchange
A bipartisan letter last week from four U.S. senators to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. demanding information about how they set interchange rates is ratcheting up the pressure on the card networks, and it could represent another step on the U.S. road to joining about 20 other countries that either …
Read More »New ‘Mobile Lockbox’ Service Could Help Drive Expedited Payments
A new service that lets consumers receive and pay bills on their handsets could help billers earn more income from last-minute payments customers make to avoid service shut-offs or late charges, observers say. The service, a so-called mobile lockbox, was announced last week by Wausau Financial Systems Inc., a provider …
Read More »Payment Issues Figure Among Reasons for Checkout Abandonment
Various issues with payment methods loom large among reasons consumers give for abandoning the checkout process on e-commerce sites, according to a survey released on Wednesday by PayPal Inc. Some 22% of 355 consumers who had abandoned shopping carts at a mix of large and small merchant sites before completing …
Read More »Visa Extends Fraud-Recovery Process to PIN-Debit Transactions
Visa Inc. is extending to PIN debit cards a process for reporting and recovering fraud losses from data breaches. In effect for credit cards and the Visa check cards since October 2006, the process, dubbed Account Data Compromise Recovery, will apply to Visa's Interlink point-of-sale debit and Plus ATM networks …
Read More »How Chase And First Data Are Splitting Chase Paymentech
It's official: JPMorgan Chase & Co. and First Data Corp. will end their joint venture that owns Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, the world's largest merchant acquirer, by the end of the year. The announcement on Tuesday morning was widely anticipated following the buyout of First Data last year by private-equity …
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