Credit card industry veteran Joseph W, Saunders has resigned his position as president of card services at Washington Mutual Inc. to become executive chairman of Visa Inc., the entity Visa announced last fall as the planned publicly held company embodying all of its worldwide operating divisions except that for Europe …

Data breaches, including the recently disclosed hack at off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. (Digital Transactions News, Jan. 22), garner a lot of headlines, but they paint a misleading picture about the resulting dangers, according to some experts. While an estimated 30% of consumers have been exposed to data breaches, only …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 6 The venerable credit card has been, by most measures, the most successful retail financial-services product in the past half-century. But even die-hard proponents can in good conscience no longer deny the growing evidence that the market for signature-based credit cards has …

Despite concerns over the recent hack at retailer TJX Cos. Inc. and other data breaches, the head of the organization overseeing the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards is optimistic that card networks, merchants, and financial institutions are on the road to more secure payments. “Compliance is often a …

Image clearing of check payments is nearing 60% of all image-exchange volume, while the total volume of paper substitute-check volume cleared is now falling for the first time, lending credence to arguments by industry observers that conversion to end-to-end image clearing is proceeding more quickly than some bankers had thought. …

In what may mark the first time either side in the long-running dispute between merchants and card companies over interchange pricing has tried to measure public opinion on the matter, a merchant lobbying group this week released a survey indicating 94% of consumers agree that card networks should be required …

A new point-of-sale payment option that converts checks to electronic debits, available starting next month, will open the retailer market for remote deposit capture, a leading payments executive says. The new option, called back-office conversion (BOC), allows merchants to scan consumer checks in bulk and process them through the automated …

NACHA announced Monday it has begun levying two new so-called network administration fees. One fee, a flat charge of one-one-hundredth of a penny, applies to all transactions passing through the automated clearing house system, except those considered on-us, or handled within a single financial institution. The Herndon, Va.-based governing body …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 5 The demise of the bold plan by the big players in electronic check conversion and truncation to combine image capture of all checks at inception with ACH distribution to all financial-institution endpoints for payment provides the payments industry with some critical …

At a time when the security of personal financial information is in the news thanks to the recently disclosed computer breach at off-price retailer The TJX Cos. Inc., vendors that sell technology and services so merchants can meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standard have formed a group …