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Banks that have both issuing and merchant-acquiring operations might generate more charge volume and make more money if they started taking advantage of new opportunities presented by online group-couponing companies, merchant-funded rewards programs, and mobile-phone-based marketers to help their merchant clients increase sales, Aite Group LLC says in a new …
Read More »Interac Launches Contactless PIN Debit Cards in Canada
Contactless debit cards will make their formal debut in Canada next year with the launch of Interac Flash from Acxsys Corp.’s Interac Association, Canada’s national debit network. Interac’s first two Flash issuers are Scotiabank and RBC Royal Bank, which will roll out their first contactless cards next summer. The first …
Read More »Visa Suggests an Interchange Plan to the Fed; Merchants Blast It
Visa Inc. and a prominent law firm serving financial-industry clients want the Federal Reserve Board to regulate debit card interchange by setting an “average effective interchange rate” and then letting the payment card networks set their own rates as long as the average interchange rate on transactions subject to regulation …
Read More »Hypercom Makes Nice With VeriFone, Agrees to Buyout
Six weeks ago, point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. made an unsolicited, $283 million cash bid for smaller U.S. rival Hypercom Corp., an offer Hypercom immediately rejected as too low and described as “opportunistic and intended to disrupt our business.” Hypercom went so far as to adopt a so-called poison …
Read More »Wireless Carriers Unveil Isis, Their Mobile Payments Joint Venture
In a move the payments industry had expected since early August, the nation’s largest wireless carriers on Tuesday announced they had formed a joint venture to run a point-of-sale mobile-payments network. The new company, known as Isis, will be headed by Michael Abbott, formerly an executive with GE Capital’s proprietary …
Read More »Consumer Groups, Banks Battle to Influence Fed’s Debit Rules
Recent meetings between Federal Reserve staff members, consumer groups, and payments executives show just how divergent the views are as the Fed prepares the first-ever regulations on U.S. payment card interchange. Consumer groups are pushing for “at-par” debit card interchange—essentially, no interchange. A big regional bank, however, said the Fed …
Read More »Accertify Will Become Part of AmEx in $150 Million Deal
American Express Co. on Thursday announced it will pay approximately $150 million to buy a software startup in suburban Chicago whose product lets online merchants automate order screening for fraud. Founded in 2007, Accertify Inc. has built a client base that includes Barnes & Noble, Urban Outfitters, and 1800 Flowers …
Read More »Eye on Earnings: First Data, Green Dot, Heartland, Cardtronics
Payments companies ranging from leading merchant processors to prepaid card and ATM managers reported transaction growth in the third quarter, but some also faced pricing pressures and other drags on the bottom line. –No. 1 payment processor First Data Corp. said transactions in its merchant-processing unit called Retail and Alliance …
Read More »Survey Outlines Compliance Challenge Among Small Merchants
With a freshly revised version of industry rules for payment card data security having just emerged (Digital Transactions News, Oct. 28), further evidence is also surfacing of the compliance challenge acquirers face with the smallest merchants. Indeed, the smaller the business, the less sensitive it is to the possibility of …
Read More »PCI Council Releases ‘Steady as She Goes’ Update of Security Rules
The new version 2.0 of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) came out Thursday, an upgrade the PCI Security Standards Council says contains no major changes. Still, a document summarizing all the tweaks to the major card networks' common set of data-protection rules runs 20 pages in length. Among …
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