Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …

Contactless payment took another step forward in the mass-transit market with the announcement on Thursday by two key New York City-area transportation agencies that they will run a pilot of MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass system next year. The Port Authority will install contactless readers at 40 turnstiles in all 13 of …

Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …

Walk-in bill-payment provider IPP of America Inc. on Tuesday announced it had raised $20.5 million from three institutional investors, capital that will enable the fast-growing company to expand its physical presence and add more billers to its network. The investment also represents the first round of venture-capital financing arranged by …

A potent new technique that phishing fraudsters have started using to thwart efforts to shut down their bogus Web sites has inspired a panel at the Anti-Phishing Working Group to hammer out a new policy that would get domain registries to disable criminal sites. The new policy, called the domain …

Getting financial institutions and telecommunications providers to agree on major issues related to mobile payments is one of the most difficult problems faced by the nascent mobile-payments industry. Nonetheless, some banks want to plant a stake on the mobile-payments turf early, as evidenced by the announcement this week that Citigroup …

With its announcement on Thursday that it is working with a U.K. provider to enable mobile access to credit card accounts in the U.S., Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has joined rival payments processors First Data Corp. and Metavante Corp. in entering the nascent but highly promising business of mobile …

Electronic-payment security experts predicted fraudsters would turn their attention to less-guarded telephone-based banking systems as a result of banks' efforts to beef up online-banking security in the wake of federal regulations promulgated in 2005. Now comes a new study about identity fraud, which, while not showing a causal relationship, gives …

In an effort related to a broader initiative to tighten risk management in the automated clearing house network, NACHA this week announced its voting membership has approved a rule that requires companies that originate transactions to identify themselves with names their customers will recognize. The new rule, which goes into …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp. on Monday said it is talking with France-based Ingenico about the $332 million buyout offer Ingenico made last week, an offer that came at a time when Phoenix, Ariz.-based Hypercom is trying to buy the POS terminal unit of another French company, Thales S.A. Ingenico …