Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
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,” …
Read More »Albertson’s Will Pilot Biometric Authentication from Pay By Touch
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 …
Read More »New Check Software to Let Merchants Cash in on Check 21
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 …
Read More »The Sub-$2 Market Keeps Growing?at the POS As Well As Online
The number of Americans ages 12 and up who bought sub-$2 digital content online in the past year has ballooned to more than 14 million, up from 4 million a year ago, according to a survey released today. “The data suggest that the online micropayments market has grown significantly in …
Read More »Discover Sues, AmEx-MBNA Get Set in Wake of Supreme Court Decision
Within minutes of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision this morning to let stand a lower court's ruling forcing Visa and MasterCard to allow members to issue cards on the American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services Inc. networks, Discover filed suit against the bank card associations and AmEx announced it …
Read More »PayPal Launches First Campaign to Sign up ‘Off-eBay’ Merchants
PayPal Inc. is in the midst of rolling out its first marketing campaign to sign up non-eBay merchants for its online payment service. Dubbed “PayPal for Business” and aimed at what PayPal considers small and medium-size Internet merchants, the campaign features a telemarketing effort, a direct-mail blast, and a new, …
Read More »A Complement to POP Could Come from NACHA
The National Automated Clearing House Association is mulling an idea for a new point-of-sale electronic check product that it hopes might overcome some of the obstacles its existing POS service, called POP, has run into. Tentatively called “back-office conversion,” or BOC, the idea would allow merchants to send all checks …
Read More »NACHA Will Start Testing a New Internet Payment Type Next Spring
The National Automated Clearing House Association, Herndon, Va., is preparing to launch a test early next spring of a new electronic transaction type for payments on the Internet. The new payment category would be best suited for payments to so-called spontaneous retailing sites?those operated by hard goods merchants, rather than …
Read More »PINless Debit Could Crimp the ACH’s Style on the Internet
Although Internet transactions have become a highly popular form of payment on the automated clearing house network, the emergence of direct debit online may stunt the growth of Web ACH transactions, an executive with a major Internet payment processor said today. Internet payments, which the National Automated Clearing House Association …
Read More »Fed Says ARC, Check 21 Will Eat More and More into Check Volume
The volume of paper checks processed by the Federal Reserve is falling at a rate of 10% to 11% so far this year and is expected to plunge another 13% to 15% in 2005, according to James M. Lyon, first vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. This …
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