Acquiring

Paradata Systems Inc. is getting set to build up its market share in Internet-based transaction processing in the U.S. To that end, it has added two U.S.-based transaction-processing veterans to its board and is starting to seek out larger independent sales organizations and other resellers to more rapidly expand its …

In a bid to accelerate growth in its merchant base and in its transaction volumes, United Bank Card Inc. says it will give card terminals, check readers, and signature-capture devices free to merchants signed on by independent sales organizations contracted with the Hampton, New Jersey-based processor. The company, which says …

Discover Financial Service's Inc.'s proposed acquisition of the Pulse EFT network, announced yesterday (Digital Transactions News, Nov. 15), hands the Riverwoods, Ill.-based card company instant credibility in the business of PIN debit, but it also may propel Discover's efforts to break into the high-growth signature-debit card arena. Discover, apparently encouraged …

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 …