Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly and John Stewart Continuing its recent string of setbacks, American Express Co. Thursday lost a crucial federal court fight in which it defended policies banning merchants from steering AmEx cardholders to cheaper forms of payment. The U.S. Department of Justice and 17 state attorneys general challenged the …
Read More »Heartland’s Decision to Wind Down Leaf Throws Spotlight on Tablet Software
Merchants using Leaf, a tablet-based point-of-sale system that its owner Heartland Payment Systems Inc. is winding down, will continue to be supported, but there will be no further sales of the system, Leaf president Sarah McCrary tells Digital Transactions News. The expense and complication of supporting hardware to accept chip …
Read More »With Its Dinerware and pcAmerica Deals, Heartland Lays out a New Direction for Leaf
Heartland Payment Systems Inc. has acquired point-of-sale system developers Dinerware Inc. and pcAmerica, both makers of restaurant point-of-sale systems, Heartland announced Friday. Terms were not disclosed. The acquisitions spurred Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland to create a dedicated business unit call Heartland Commerce, which includes Dinerware, pcAmercia, Xpient, Leaf, and Liquor POS. …
Read More »Already on the Way Out, SSL Data Security Could Get the Boot From the PCI Council
The PCI Security Standards Council issued a bulletin Friday saying that no version of the Secure Socket Layers (SSL) protocol for protecting Internet communications meets its definition of strong cryptography. Accordingly, the Council said it will soon revise versions 3.0 of its main Payment Card Security data-security standard and the …
Read More »When mPOS Goes Awry, Whom Do You Call? Payments Veteran Kahn Hopes It’s Boomtown
Mobile point-of-sale systems have come a long way in a short time, but in one respect they may have grown up too fast. They may have outstripped the ability of merchants and merchant-service providers to provide the kind of constant and consistent support that’s necessary to keep the tablets humming. …
Read More »A New Study Says More Than 30% of Big Merchants Are Not PCI-Compliant
Fudging the numbers about their merchants’ compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) may be a common practice by merchant acquirers if findings from a new study about payment card data security are to be believed. The study by the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, an association of more than …
Read More »Braintree’s Mobile Transactions Grew 400% in Fourth Quarter
Online-payments provider Braintree says 2014 was a banner year for the Chicago-based unit of PayPal Inc., with total transactions growing to 2.8 times the 2013 tally. In a blog post, chief executive Bill Ready also said that Braintree’s mobile transactions in the fourth quarter increased to four times the number …
Read More »In the Race Against the EMV Deadline, Merchant Acceptance And Debit Lag
In the relentless push toward compliance with the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) smart card standard, two critical factors are lagging behind: merchant acceptance and EMV debit. That’s according to executives who spoke Tuesday at a conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on EMV and mobile payments. U.S. issuers and merchants face an …
Read More »Hoping to Avoid ‘Or Else,’ Card Networks and the PCI Council Step Up Compliance Efforts
The private sector often lives in fear of government regulation, but the payment card industry’s indigenous regulators are piling on new disclosure, monitoring and security requirements for merchant acquirers, panelists said Wednesday at the Northeast Acquirers Association (NEAA) annual conference in Boston. While many of the new rules are meant …
Read More »COMMENTARY: Securing the Future of Safe Electronic Payments
Americans love to shop. Whether online, in a small mom-and-pop business, or at a big-box retailer, shoppers turned out in droves this past holiday season. From Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday for example, online sales were up 12.6%–a record week–according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark. For the holiday season overall, …
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