UnitedHealth Group is on track to issue as many as 20 million cards that consumers can one day use for a dual purpose: to handle eligibility verification and other point-of-care payment transactions and as a debit card to electronically access funds from a health-savings account. To date UnitedHealth has issued …

Nashville, Tenn.-based independent sales organization iPayment Inc. expects on Friday to close on its $130 million cash acquisition of a merchant portfolio from First Data Corp. The portfolio consists of 25,000 small merchant accounts generating $9 billion to $10 billion in annual card volume. First Data Merchant Services will continue …

Consumer holiday spending surged ahead on Christmas Eve, according to new data released over the weekend by Visa USA. The card company says total spending on its credit and online and signature-based debit cards last Friday came to more than $4.35 billion, up 11.7% from Christmas Eve last year, ranking …

With the unrelenting rise of phishing attacks, banks and merchants are hunting for new ways to secure the identity of consumers in online transactions. That's creating opportunities for companies like LexisNexis, proprietor of one of the world's largest databases of public-record information. Now the company's RiskWise unit is looking at …

The expected surge in gift cards received this holiday season may cause a problem for online merchants that try to match billing addresses given by consumers at checkout with those on file with issuers before authorizing transactions, says ClearCommerce Corp. Online retailers will usually set their address-verification systems (AVS) to …

Viewpointe Archive Services LLC became the latest image-exchange venture to go live today when First Horizon and SunTrust Banks became the first banks to clear checks through the service. Earlier this fall, the Small Value Payments Co., New York, began moving check images for client banks, and Endpoint Exchange Inc., …

Return rates on accounts receivable check conversions are dropping despite the rapid clip at which the volume of these electronic payments is climbing, new data from the National Automated Clearing House indicate. The ARC category of ACH debit, created in March 2002, has gone from 5.3 million transactions in the …

It has been an eventful week for American Express Co. Today the company announced that Woonsocket, R.I.-based drugstore chain CVS Corp. has agreed to serve as the first national merchant to accept ExpressPay, an AmEx system that relies on radio waves rather than card swipes to authorize transactions. This news …

Citigroup Inc.'s decision to issue American Express cards may turn out to be a more symbolic than substantive victory in the credit card wars for AmEx, according to some observers. “It's clearly a victory, but more a marketing victory,” says Gwenn Bezard, a payments-industry analyst at New York-based research firm …

Visa U.S.A. says spending on its cards over the past weekend was the strongest yet seen this holiday shopping season, exceeding spending during the so-called Black Friday weekend after Thanksgiving by 15%. Indeed, Black Friday itself now ranks third in Visa spending, behind the volume reached this past Friday and …