Competitive Strategies

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 …

Dexit Inc., a Toronto-based processor of stored-value transactions using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, is expanding nationally in Canada and will begin processing transactions in other parts of the world next year?but not in the U.S. any time soon. Dexit, which allows consumers to use chip-embedded keychain “tags” to tap accounts …

Magex Ltd., a London-based e-commerce and person-to-person transaction processor, has acquired Open Payment Technologies Inc., a provider of stored-value card systems to restaurants, supermarkets, and other merchants. A price was not disclosed. Phoenix-based OPT will become a division of Magex, and Dave Ingwersen, OPT's president, is assuming the title of …

MasterCard International reports that 7 million of its 545 million debit cards linked to personal identification numbers worldwide are now enabled for use with SecureCode, the card network's security program for Internet transactions on credit and debit cards. Most of this activity is in Europe. MasterCard says some 5,800 Web …