Acquiring

7-Eleven Inc. misled consumers who signed a petition asking Congress to regulate card interchange, MasterCard Inc. charged on Tuesday, one day before officials with the convenience-store chain are expected to deliver nearly 1.7 million signed petitions to Capitol Hill. Armed with the results of a consumer survey, executives with the …

Merchants turned up the heat on banks and the bank card networks on Thursday by releasing a report showing that interchange fees in the U.S are much higher than in other countries, and arguing that policymakers in the U.S. should regulate interchange as have their counterparts overseas. “We want to …

Retailers have complained the loudest about the cost of complying with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, but comments Tuesday at a health-care payments conference indicate that medical providers also incur considerable expense to secure their card-accepting payment systems. PCI-related costs come to about $100,000 a year for …

Dozens of U.S. grocery-store chains added credit card acceptance in the 1990s, when consumers began asking to use the cards and merchant acquirers saw a ripe new market. Grocers acquiesced to keep their customers happy and because the payment card networks offered interchange breaks or other incentives. But not Aldi, …

Among lessons learned by Heartland Payment Systems Inc. after the massive data breach at the merchant acquirer last year: Don't necessarily hire the qualified security assessor (QSA) offering the lowest bid, says Robert O. Carr, chairman and CEO. Processors and merchants need to hire QSAs in the same way they …

Rising processing costs and Visa Inc.'s mandate that point-of-sale terminals be upgraded to do Triple-DES encryption for PIN-based debit transactions are prompting gas sellers to rethink PIN debit acceptance. Fuel sellers are talking about dropping PIN debit because of the hike in cost for authorization, says Branden Williams, director of …

The biggest merchants are moving toward 100% compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, but compliance among small card acceptors remains much lower, according to second-quarter statistics from Visa Inc. None of that is a surprise given PCI compliance trends in recent years. But just how far …

As the fifth anniversary of the Check 21 law draws near, the volume of paper substitute checks created by the law is in a free fall, recent data show. That, experts say, indicates the law has successfully paved the way for fully electronic clearing of check images. The number of …

Tuesday's news that Cynergy Data was filing for bankruptcy and planning to sell its assets serves as perhaps an extreme example of the fierce toll the recession is taking on independent sales organizations, observers say. Indeed, some say the ravages of reduced payment volumes, failed merchants, and squeezed margins could …

With $83 million in debt added since 2007, accounting errors, and finally the recession, the big independent sales organization Cynergy Data LLC concluded late this summer that it needed bankruptcy-court protection, according to an emerging picture of the company as it seeks to sell its assets to a private-equity firm. …