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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

While the recently unveiled joint venture between Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo Co. to create a common platform to process automated clearing house transactions isn't scheduled to become operational until 2010, the venture's very announcement by two of the biggest financial institutions in the country has sparked industry …

The federal government took in $27.1 billion in payments through credit cards in fiscal 2007 and paid at least $433 million in merchant discount fees, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Agencies that were able to break out their interchange costs …

A payment method that lets merchants convert checks at the cash register into electronic transactions shows signs of picking up momentum across a spectrum of retailers. It's quite a turnaround for the point-of-purchase electronic-check application (POP), which relies on the automated clearing house network for settlement. Only a few years …