A nine-month trial of contactless payments using near-field communication (NFC) technology in Atlanta ended this week with what its participants are calling positive results, including an apparently enthusiastic reception from the pilot's 150 users. Meanwhile, the results of the Atlanta pilot may be spurring banks, the bank card networks, handset …

Looking to make inroads in the U.S. mobile-commerce market, Valista Ltd. has launched a hosted version of its payments-gateway product and has aimed it squarely at mobile operators hoping to cash in on the trend toward so-called off-deck transactions. The payments-software vendor, based in Dublin, Ireland, and in San Mateo, …

The new organization set up by the leading payment card networks to administer the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data-security rules should lead to closer coordination on security matters among card networks, merchants, and vendors, according to one of the organization's spokesmen. Announced Thursday, the organization has already issued an update …

The U.S. person-to-person payments business, including P2P payments on cell phones, attracted yet another entrant with the announcement Tuesday by BankServ Inc. that it had acquired the managed-payments platform of Magex Holdings Ltd., a U.K. company, for an undisclosed sum. In the deal, San Francisco-based BankServ, a 10-year-old private company …

Bowing to merchant pressure, MasterCard Inc. said Tuesday it will publish its U.S. interchange rates on its Web site and cap interchange fees on certain gasoline purchases. The moves, which will include the first time either of the two major bank card associations has published its interchange rates publicly, follow …

As an e-commerce payment system being developed for the automated clearing house nears a pilot scheduled for early next year, it may confront an old issue that sank an earlier such project: the potential for lost credit card sales online. That's according to an in-depth story on the ACH and …

China, India, and other high-growth payments markets get a lot of attention nowadays, but leading U.S.-based payment-terminal marketer VeriFone Holdings Inc. still sees plenty of opportunity close to home. San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone's aggressive focus on North America comes even as its pending acquisition of Israel-based rival Lipman Electronic Engineering …

Contactless payments loom large among rising challenges now confronting even the most dominant processors in the U.S. merchant-acquiring business, according to a new study. The report estimates that acquirers processed 45.5 billion credit, prepaid, and signature-debit transactions in 2005, a huge electronic transactions market it says is controlled by five …

It doesn't go live until next March 16, yet the new back-office conversion (BOC) electronic-check payment option already is attracting a good deal of interest from payment processors and their customers looking to reduce volumes of paper checks and speed customer service. “We believe this new conversion code will definitely …

In the Federal Reserve Board's final rule that extends Regulation E provisions to the fast-growing payroll card sector, electronic transaction reporting won out over paper statements, but issuers may take on added risk with a longer time period for dispute resolution, experts say. After a two-year process that involved taking …