The automated clearing house is handling more electronic transactions than ever, though growth in its electronic check category is showing signs of cooling off. The National Automated Clearing House Association reports the ACH network interchanged almost 2.1 billion transactions among financial institutions overall in the third quarter, the first time …

With the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check 21) taking effect today, Metavante Corp. hopes to use its latest acquisition in the payments business to help it leverage sales to banks for distributed check capture and move the two national check image exchanges that have gone live so …

Yahoo Finance's decision to shutter its 4-year-old PayDirect person-to-person payment service means it is also discontinuing a service it started up only 10 months ago to allow electronic remittances from domestic users to recipients overseas. The new international payment service was an effort by Yahoo Finance, a unit of Sunnyvale, …

In an effort to make amends to sellers that were affected by its recent service outage, PayPal Inc. will credit all seller transaction fees incurred between 12 a.m. and midnight Pacific time tomorrow. Accounts eligible to receive the credits, which PayPal will distribute by Nov. 25, are premier and business …

Northwest Airlines Inc. is enjoying a breakthrough year in electronic ticket sales. The St. Paul, Minn.-based air carrier, the fifth largest in the world, is booking between $4 million and $6 million a day in ticket sales through its Web site, twice the volume the airline's site accounted for a …

TransFirst, a Dallas-based processor that has grown significantly through acquisition over the past two years, has appointed two new executives to run its divisions concerned with independent sales organizations, agents, and resellers. Ryan O'Connor, formerly with Nova Information Systems, a unit of U.S. Bank, has become president of TransFirst's ISA …

PayPal Inc. may have made headlines last week with its intermittent outages, but third-quarter numbers released this week by its parent company, Internet auction kingpin eBay Inc., show the online payments processor racking up significant growth in accounts, transactions, and dollar volume, while continuing to chop fraud losses. San Jose, …

The Canadian Payments Association is planning to implement a new rule for clearing Internet transactions involving the electronic debiting of consumer accounts. The association hopes to finalize the rule in December, which if approved would take effect early next year, according to Roger Dowdall, vice president of communication and education …

Evolution Benefits Inc. and 1-800 Contacts Inc. have reached an agreement under which the retailer of replacement contact lenses will accept Evolution Benefits' Benny debit card. The card, cobranded with MasterCard and Visa, will tap flexible-spending and health-reimbursement accounts set up by corporate employees, which the employees have funded with …

Evidence is starting to emerge that electronic bill presentment, like payment, is poised to explode. Statistics from Atlanta-based processor CheckFree Corp. show it was averaging a delivery rate of slightly more than 1 million bills a month during the third quarter of 2002. By the fourth quarter of 2003, it …