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Though Capital One Financial Corp. and prepaid card manager NetSpend Holdings Inc. late on Monday said they had “mutually agreed” to call off Cap One’s planned $700 million cash acquisition of NetSpend, the move may have been a consequence of the deal’s hefty price tag, says an analyst who follows …
Read More »E-Commerce Sales Continue to Rack up Double-Digit Gains
Retailers and analysts have been giving forecasts ranging from ho-hum to downright pessimistic for the upcoming holiday spending period, but the outlook for online retailers almost certainly is better. Growth rates in electronic-commerce remain near 20%, the U.S. Commerce Dept.'s Census Bureau reported on Monday. The Census Bureau's quarterly report …
Read More »Embroiled in Boardroom Fight, Pay By Touch Gets a Temporary Boss
An outside manager with restructuring experience, Thomas Lumsden of FTI Consulting Inc., is now running financially troubled biometric-payment provider Pay By Touch under terms of a Delaware court order signed Friday, San Francisco-based Pay By Touch announced on Monday. The Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington appointed Lumsden, senior managing director …
Read More »With Plug-In, PayPal Looks for Expanded E-Commerce Reach
PayPal Inc. on Tuesday will make available to its entire account base a so-called virtual debit card it has been testing with a large number of account holders for nearly 18 months. The new product, which PayPal has dubbed Plug-In, carries a MasterCard Worldwide brand and allows users to buy …
Read More »Saddled with Post-IPO Debt, First Data Shaves Costs with Layoffs
The ax is falling at First Data Corp. two months after the huge processor's $29 billion leveraged buyout by private-equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Greenwood Village, Colo.-based First Data announced Thursday that it is cutting 6% of its workforce, or about 1,700 employees. Thanks to recent acquisitions, however, …
Read More »Firethorn Chief Says Qualcomm Deal Will Speed up M-Payments
Qualcomm Inc.'s $210 million cash deal for Firethorn Holdings Inc., announced on Wednesday, is expected to accelerate Firethorn's movement toward mobile payments and hands Qualcomm a significant stake in the rapidly developing markets for both banking and payments via handsets, according to Tripp Rackley, chief executive of Atlanta-based Firethorn. “All …
Read More »E-Commerce Fraud Rate Holds Steady, But Fraud-Control Costs Go Up
Online fraud rates are holding steady but the cost of fraud is going up as e-commerce grows and companies hire more people to weed out suspect orders, according to CyberSource Corp.'s 9th annual e-commerce fraud survey. The merchant processor and risk-management firm's recent survey of 318 American and Canadian retailers …
Read More »Consumers And Wall Street Yawn at the Biggest Breach Yet
Off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. might hold the dubious honor of being the merchant where the nation's worst breach of payment card data occurred, but you'd never know it by looking at the company's latest financials. Revenue and profits are up, and executives made only passing reference to the breach …
Read More »AT&T: 10 Million Phones Will Be Preloaded for Banking by End of ’08
AT&T Inc., which on Tuesday announced it is launching a nationwide mobile-banking service, expects to have 500,000 mobile phones preloaded with the software necessary for the service by the end of the year and 10 million handsets so equipped by the close of 2008, according to a senior executive with …
Read More »Though Still Shaky, a Smaller TRM Gets Closer to Profitability
Still financially challenged but claiming to be on the mend, TRM Corp., operator of the nation's second-largest non-bank ATM network, reduced its loss in the third quarter as it culled underperforming machines and cut expenses. The Portland, Ore.-based firm on Friday reported a net loss of $4.89 million compared with …
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