Acquiring

Responding to a year that has seen a steady barrage of viruses, worms, trojans, and other malicious computer attacks, VeriFone Inc. and McAfee Inc. announced today they will offer the first anti-virus software product to protect point-of-sale terminals linked to the Internet. The software will be available starting early next …

Just ahead of the holiday shopping season, VeriSign Inc. has introduced a new mark that e-commerce sites can display to reassure shoppers about the security of their payments. The VeriSign Secured Seal denotes that a Web site uses Secure Sockets Layer encryption and other technologies?including the company's gateways–to guard customer …

TransFirst, a Dallas-based processor that has grown significantly through acquisition over the past two years, has appointed two new executives to run its divisions concerned with independent sales organizations, agents, and resellers. Ryan O'Connor, formerly with Nova Information Systems, a unit of U.S. Bank, has become president of TransFirst's ISA …

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 …

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 …

Moneris Solutions, a major acquiring processor in North America, has become the first processor to agree to adopt Peppercoin Inc.'s latest micropayments system. Under an agreement reached this week, Peppercoin will serve as a gateway for transactions performed at both brick-and-mortar and online U.S. merchant locations and sites served by …

Authorize.net, which has been the victim of a series of denial-of-service attacks since Sept. 15, says today it has implemented unspecified “industry-leading solutions” that are thwarting the assaults on its data centers, which process card transactions for more than 100,000 merchants. It also says its engineers from the start of …

Retail Decisions Inc. and I4Commerce Inc. have both signed on new Internet merchants for e-commerce transaction processing. Indianapolis-based Finish Line Inc., which operates 560 stores selling athletic wear in 46 states, has signed on for ReD's ebitGuard online fraud detection service to screen for fraud on its Web site. Kent …

The parade of major ATM deployers out of the business of owning and managing ATM networks continues with the announcement that eFunds Corp., Scottsdale, Ariz., is selling its fleet of 17,200 machines, which are under merchant contracts in the U.S. and Canada, to Portland, Ore.-based TRM Corp. for $150 million …

MasterCard International expects to bring thousands of new Internet merchants into its SecureCode transaction security program by the middle of next month. The new merchant signings will result from a major push the card network is making for SecureCode among large, well-know online retailers as well as among Web hosting …