The Web site for specialty charge card issuer Diner's Club scored 100% reliability and topped a new weekly test of both reliability and response time at nine credit card Web sites. The Diner's site posted a response time of 7.03 seconds, significantly ahead of the second-place site, Capital One (8.20 …

The popularity of gift cards continues to grow, with some 64% of U.S. adults, or a projected 139 million people, now buying or receiving the products annually, up from 59% last year and just 36% three years ago. That's according to the latest annual survey on gift card usage from …

Metavante Corp. continues to pursue an aggressive acquisition strategy in electronic payments with it announcement today that it agreed to buy VECTORsgi, a software company in Addison, Texas, that sells check-imaging software. The acquisition, valued at $100 million in cash plus another $35 million to be paid if certain targets …

As the PayPal Inc. online payment service returned to normal yesterday, its technical problems of the past several days have raised the specter in some circles of the company's non-bank status. Some observers, particularly bankers, have long argued that as a non-bank financial entity, PayPal is not bound by many …

PayPal Inc. late this afternoon says it is making headway against the software glitch that has plagued its Web site since Friday, rendering it inaccessible at times for both buyers and sellers who use the PayPal electronic payment system. “We made progress today, and we've got eBay and PayPal technical …

MasterCard International announced today it will launch pilots of its PayPass electronic payment system on mobile phones from Motorola Inc. The Purchase, N.Y.-based card company says the pilots will get under way at a “variety” of unspecified locations in the U.S by the end of the year. The Motorola phones …

A veteran ATM network executive thinks he can succeed at building a national health-care transaction-processing system, though similar efforts have a dismal record of failure. The executive, Joseph E. Wolfson, founder of the Metroteller electronic funds transfer network, expects the HealthTransaction Network to begin processing transactions from health-care insurance companies …

A new proposal that would require banks that originate unauthorized automated clearing house transactions to pay fees to receiving banks went out to ACH members for comment this week, but not without controversy. “This is by far the most polarizing topic the ACH industry has seen in a long time,” …

Albertson's Inc., a Boise, Idaho-based chain of supermarkets, will install and test a biometric-based system to authenticate electronic transactions by the end of the first quarter next year. The system, which relies on mathematically derived templates of consumers' fingerprints, comes from San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, which has been aggressively …

With the effective date for the Check Clearing for the 21st Century (Check 21) Act only 22 days away, few electronic payments observers doubt that the efficiencies of check imaging and image exchange will benefit banks. A lingering question, though, has been how much it will benefit retailers who accept …