Pursuing a 2-year-old push to sell acceptance to online merchants, PayPal Inc. reached a milestone in that effort with this week's high-profile signing of bookseller Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Web site. The nation's largest bookstore chain's e-commerce operation should help the San Jose, Calif.-based online transaction processor further reduce its …

Responding to the rapid build-up in popularity of gift cards, a federal banking regulator has issued guidelines telling banks what information they should disclose?and how they should disclose it?to both the buyers and ultimate users of the prepaid plastic. The new rules, which bear on matters such as expiration dates, …

Seeking to address industry uncertainty about its guidelines on online-banking security, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council this week released a set of clarifications it says addresses “a representation” of questions it has received from banks, technology companies, and banking examiners. This latest document from the FFIEC, an agency that …

More and more consumers now expect their last-minute bill payments to be credited to their accounts with near instantaneous effect. And, increasingly, billers and processors are meeting that expectation?or at least laying plans to. “The trend is toward real-time [bill payment],” says Dave Fortney, senior vice president for electronic presentment …

Discover Network's recent certification of ViVOtech card readers indicates Discover is moving ahead with a contactless card program, but the No. 4 general-purpose card network is staying mum about the details. Discover says it has certified several readers from Santa Clara, Calif.-based ViVOtech Inc., a specialist in contactless payment hardware, …

Against a backdrop of an increasing number of online transactions requiring manual checking by Internet merchants to control fraud, transaction-gateway provider CyberSource Corp. this week introduced a service that lets merchants pinpoint customers' locations and write business rules to control whether, in light of this information, orders should be fulfilled. …

All-electronic check image exchange got a boost this week with the addition of another large regional bank-holding company, Pittsburgh-based The PNC Financial Services Group, to SVPCO-Electronic Clearing Services' image-exchange network. Meanwhile, SVPCO reported today that it processed 3 million average daily items in July, up 17% from June's average. The …

Looking to increase the number of debit cards tied to flexible-spending accounts and other tax-advantaged health-care plans, MasterCard Worldwide has introduced a system that the Purchase, N.Y.-based bank card network says collects item-level detail and provides real-time substantiation at the point of sale. Substantiation, required by Internal Revenue Service rules …

Some 24.6 million U.S. consumers bought a ring tone in the second quarter of 2006, and they showed a clear preference for so-called real tones, or master tones, over polyphonic and mono ring tones, according to research released today. Ring tones for mobile phones, which are snippets of popular songs, …

New consolidated industry data show the number of substitute checks, or image replacement documents (IRDs), flowing through image-exchange networks surpassed 100 million for the first time in June, but the share of paper relative to all image-exchange volume is declining. According to the Electronic Check Clearing House Organization (ECCHO), the …