Merchants' sluggishness in achieving compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) is a source of some frustration to vendors like LaGarde Inc., but Michael Levin, executive vice president of marketing and business development for the Olathe, Kan.-based marketer of shopping-cart software for e-commerce, doesn't see the pace picking …

Hoping to process a growing volume of bill payments customers make in its 76 stores, Verizon Communications Inc. is installing a new point-of-sale system that when complete will speed up check transactions, offer customers real-time payment posting, and allow the telecommunications giant to archive transaction information from multiple payment forms, …

BidPay.com Inc., an online auction-payment processor that was shut down in December by owner First Data Corp., went live again this week with new pricing, international sales support, and a strategy to appeal to sellers by offering protection against certain chargebacks. The re-launch follows the March 2006 acquisition of BidPay …

Online retailers have long deployed front-end screening systems to check card-not-present transactions for fraud. A new software product announced Tuesday, however, is apparently the first commercially available product to automate what is now a heavily manual process of checking orders that don't pass these screens and yet are not unambiguously …

Think of electronic bill payments and, not surprisingly, the Internet usually comes to mind first. But many billers, especially banks, have yet to offer bill payments through telephone-based customer-service systems or automated interactive voice-response units, experts tell Digital Transactions magazine in an upcoming story on expedited bill payments. The Web's …

The share of e-commerce dollars coming from so-called alternative payment methods will grow from 12% in 2005 to 26% in 2009, an electronic-payments expert says. And two such alternatives emerging only now will gain momentum over the coming three years, with PIN debit accounting for about 3% and NACHA's new …

New technical specifications for so-called near-field communication (NFC), released this week by an international rules-setting body backing the technology, should add momentum in the U.S. to the trend toward contactless payments on mobile phones. “A lot's happening behind closed doors,” says Erik Michielsen, director of RFID and M2M research at …

Another indication of the increased trafficking of electronic check images through image-exchange networks has emerged with a report from SVPCO that its Image Payments Network handled 50.8 million items in May, up 44.4% from April's volume. Average daily traffic hit 2.3 million images, a 31.2% jump from the previous month. …

ATM Direct, which this week announced agreements with an electronic funds transfer network and an Internet merchant to process PIN-secured debit card payments on the Web, has signed another online retailer, which will go live on its system in August, Robert Ziegler, senior vice president and general manager of the …

In a bid to meet what appears to be a clear market demand for services to help online merchants satisfy card-data security rules, CyberSource Corp. Tuesday launched a product that removes merchants from the business of handling and storing payment data. The move comes as merchants and processors increasingly find …