American Express Co. made no pricing concessions to Walgreen's Co. to keep the pharmacy giant accepting AmEx cards, a top executive says. Responding to questions from securities analysts during a conference call yesterday to discuss AmEx's fourth-quarter and year-end 2004 results, Gary L. Crittenden, chief financial officer at the New …

Discover Financial Services Inc.'s deal with GE Consumer Finance Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. will lead to a huge volume boost for Discover and help the Riverwoods, Ill.-based company offer pricing to potential issuing partners that exceeds the interchange income they can get from Visa and MasterCard, an expert observer …

ClearCommerce Corp.'s hopes to better its chances of winning business by becoming part of a publicly held company played a major role in its decision to merge with eFunds Corp., according to a senior executive at ClearCommerce. The Austin, Texas-based provider of transaction gateway and anti-fraud services to Internet merchants …

PayPal Inc. saw the volume of transactions it handled in the fourth quarter last year soar 46%, to 99.6 million, over the same period in 2003, while dollar volume climbed fully 51% to $5.6 billion, according to data released this week by the online transaction processor's parent company, eBay Inc. …

Piggly Wiggly Carolina Co.'s decision to roll out a biometric payment system to all 85 stores in its chain was driven by both transaction-cost savings and customer interest, a senior executive for the Charleston, S.C.-based grocer says. In related news, Pay By Touch, the San Francisco-based company whose system Piggly …

E-commerce gateway Retail Decisions Inc. has announced enhancements to its anti-fraud technology that will, among other things, cut the number of transactions online retailers must refer for manual review by up to 30%. The Hazlet, N.J.-based operating unit of U.K.-based Retail Decisions PLC has integrated neural-networking technology called Prism and …

Two key results of First American Payment Systems L.P.'s acquisition of National Data Funding Corp.?consummated late last year and announced last week?are that First American gains an inhouse facility for wireless, Internet Protocol-based transaction processing while R. Scott Hatfield, one of NDFC's long-time owners, can now devote himself full-time to …

Pharmacy giant Walgreen's Co., which a month ago announced it would stop accepting American Express cards effective today, has reversed itself, announcing it will continue taking AmEx cards after reaching a new multi-year deal with the card company. Terms of the new arrangement were not released. “We were able to …

The automated clearing house system will account for more than one-fifth of all consumer bill payments by 2007, thanks to dramatic growth in the conversion of checks sent to billers' lockboxes into electronic ACH transactions, according to a new study from consulting firm TowerGroup, Needham, Mass. This conversion, known as …

PayPal Inc. has announced it will no longer allow sellers that have bank accounts registered with the San Jose, Calif.-based processor to block payments funded by credit cards, effective next month. Sellers' ability to refuse such payments has been part of the company's “Payment Receiving Preferences” policy for so-called premier …