Competitive Strategies

As the PayPal Inc. online payment service returned to normal yesterday, its technical problems of the past several days have raised the specter in some circles of the company's non-bank status. Some observers, particularly bankers, have long argued that as a non-bank financial entity, PayPal is not bound by many …

MasterCard International announced today it will launch pilots of its PayPass electronic payment system on mobile phones from Motorola Inc. The Purchase, N.Y.-based card company says the pilots will get under way at a “variety” of unspecified locations in the U.S by the end of the year. The Motorola phones …

A veteran ATM network executive thinks he can succeed at building a national health-care transaction-processing system, though similar efforts have a dismal record of failure. The executive, Joseph E. Wolfson, founder of the Metroteller electronic funds transfer network, expects the HealthTransaction Network to begin processing transactions from health-care insurance companies …

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 …

Within minutes of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision this morning to let stand a lower court's ruling forcing Visa and MasterCard to allow members to issue cards on the American Express Co. and Discover Financial Services Inc. networks, Discover filed suit against the bank card associations and AmEx announced it …

PayPal Inc. is in the midst of rolling out its first marketing campaign to sign up non-eBay merchants for its online payment service. Dubbed “PayPal for Business” and aimed at what PayPal considers small and medium-size Internet merchants, the campaign features a telemarketing effort, a direct-mail blast, and a new, …

The National Automated Clearing House Association is mulling an idea for a new point-of-sale electronic check product that it hopes might overcome some of the obstacles its existing POS service, called POP, has run into. Tentatively called “back-office conversion,” or BOC, the idea would allow merchants to send all checks …

Responding to increasing demand from the independent sales organizations that distribute its ATMs, Fremont, Calif.-based Tranax Technologies Inc. is planning to introduce a low-end multifunction machine toward the end of the year that will combine conventional cash dispensing with typical kiosk functions like ticket and gift-card sales and check cashing …

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 …

Nashville-based iPayment Inc., a publicly held independent sales organization that has executed a string of acquisitions over the past two years in the rapidly consolidating acquiring market, today announced its acquisition of Transaction Solutions LLC, a Pittsburgh-based ISO serving 4,000 small merchants with $500 million in annual card volume. No …