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 …
Read More »Its Overhaul Complete, Visa Shoots for the Moon with Its Pending IPO
Visa Inc. late Friday said it aims to raise $10 billion in its upcoming initial public offering of stock. The figure, while preliminary, is four times the $2.4 billion MasterCard Inc. grossed in its May 2006 IPO, the first chance the market had to value a bank card network. A …
Read More »Retailers Must Do More To Tout Tap-And-Go, Expert Argues
Lack of consumer awareness regarding contactless transaction technology ranks as a leading concern among retailers and may ultimately impede development of contactless payments based on mobile phones, research released this week indicates. Yet most merchants that have adopted contactless programs don't promote those programs to their customers, according to the …
Read More »A Bill Offers Relief to Merchants Besieged by Suits over Receipts
Few people would deny that a law Congress enacted in 2003 mandating payment card receipt truncation had a noble aim?to prevent criminals from getting enough data when they obtained other people's transaction receipts to steal identities or commit card fraud. But some merchants, while complying with the truncation provision that …
Read More »PCI Council: Software Security Guidelines To Be a Standard
In a move long expected by software developers, merchant processors, and others, the PCI Security Standards Council this week said it is adding a new standard for point-of-sale software based on Visa Inc.'s set of best practices for card-processing applications. The action is aimed at strengthening the software component of …
Read More »Before IPO, Visa Reaches a $2.25 Billion AmEx Antitrust Settlement
In an attempt to clear away legal issues before its planned initial public stock offering next year, Visa Inc. today said it would pay rival American Express Co. more than $2 billion to settle an antitrust lawsuit AmEx brought seeking compensation for lost business during the years a Visa rule …
Read More »Pay By Touch Melodrama Includes Board Fight and Possible Bankruptcy
Biometrics payment technology provider Pay By Touch reaped a bushel of favorable publicity last week when it launched its fingerprint-based system at 10 Chicago-area Shell stations in the company's first petroleum-sector rollout. What went unmentioned, however, was that Pay By Touch's parent company was entangled in court fights on the …
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