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Debitman Card Inc.'s new chief executive sees no significant strategic changes ahead for the PIN debit network, though he says some new products are likely within a year, possibly including a stored-value offering. “I think the strategy is spot-on,” says Michael Grossman, a former Intuit Inc. executive and most recently …
Read More »PayPal Mobile Launches with Five Merchants, More in ‘Pipleline’
PayPal Inc. today officially joined the race for mobile-phone transactions, announcing the commercial availability of its much-anticipated PayPal Mobile service. The product, word of which leaked two weeks ago while the San Jose, Calif.-based processor was testing it with its own employees and those of parent company eBay Inc., comes …
Read More »New Merchants Will Fuel Contactless Growth, But Trouble Lurks
Shipments of contactless-payment transponders–the cards, keyfobs, and other devices consumers use to make radio-wave payments at the point of sale?will explode in 2006, reaching 45 million units, up from 13 million last year, according to ABI Research, an Oyster Bay, N.Y., research firm that follows radio-frequency-identification technology markets. Most of …
Read More »SVPCO Swaps More Images in First Quarter Than in All of 2005
The country's largest image-exchange network reported today it handled more volume in the year's first quarter than it processed in all of 2005, while traffic reached new heights in March. Average daily volume at SVPCO's Image Payments Network, which links a dozen banks as well as the Federal Reserve for …
Read More »Mobile-Video Demand Mounting Fast, But Right Pricing Model Is Elusive
Despite low adoption so far, video delivered via mobile phones will generate $501 million in annual revenue by 2010, up from $62 million last year, according to a new study from JupiterResearch, New York. A total of 41% of cell-phone users surveyed indicated interest in receiving some form of video …
Read More »ATM Roundup: BofA’s New Mall Machines; Triton Shipments up 21%
Simon Property Group Inc. announced today it will install some 360 ATMs in 160 shopping malls it manages in 31 states. The machines, which are owned and operated by Bank of America, will be live by June in the malls' common areas, said Simon, the nation's largest owner and manager …
Read More »Discover Claims Retailer-Friendly Debit, But Details Remain Murky
More than a month after officially unveiling its much-anticipated entry into the signature-debit card market, details of Discover Financial Services Inc.'s debit card strategy remain sketchy. Discover's sales pitch to financial institutions to issue its debit cards is built around its ability to offer issuers an interchange rate that is …
Read More »Pay By Touch Looks for ‘Network Effect’ from Chicago Concentration
Electronic point-of-sale transactions secured by biometric scans may get a boost now that Pay By Touch Inc. has switched on processing service in 204 Jewel-Osco stores in the Chicago area as well as in the rest of Illionois, and in Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The San Francisco company's latest implementation …
Read More »First Data’s Bailis Ponders His Strategy for Debit Cards, Services
Few people know First Data Corp. better than David P. Bailis. Starting in 1989, he worked on everything from health-care payments to e-commerce and held titles as diverse as general counsel and chief administrative officer. He retired in 2001 to dabble in his own financial-services consulting businesses. But he came …
Read More »Google Could Be Weeks Away from Launching a PayPal-Like Service
Google Inc., whose recent moves to create an online-payments service for use on some of its own platforms have stirred considerable speculation about its ambitions in electronic transactions, will launch a service soon that will compete with existing e-commerce payment marks like PayPal, says a source familiar with the matter. …
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