By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Two hotel and resort chains this week reported apparent data breaches involving payment cards used at their locations. These latest compromises come less than two weeks after compromise occurred between early March and mid-June. Millennium, which has 14 luxury or boutique U.S. properties, isolated and then took …
Read More »Eye on College Payments: More Convenience Fees, And a Nasty Tuition Scam
It’s back-to-school time, and that means it’s also time for college-age students and their parents to pay tuition charges. Most of the largest private, public, and community colleges accept credit cards for these charges, but a growing majority of these institutions also assess hefty so-called convenience fees to cardholders, according …
Read More »New EMVCo Device-Certification Process Could Give a Lift to NFC Mobile Payments
A streamlined approval for contactless mobile-payment devices announced Wednesday by chip card standards body EMVCo could help mobile-payments boosters realize their elusive dream that the coming of chip cards to the U.S. also will lift smart-phone-based payments. The new approval process is meant to confirm that mobile devices enabled for …
Read More »Eye on Security: Malware Planted in HEI Hotels and Micros POS Systems
By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews HEI Hotels & Resorts disclosed Friday that malware on point-of-sale systems may have captured payment card information at restaurants and other locations within 20 of its properties. At the same time, the payments industry is watching for clues about the extent of a compromise at Oracle Corp.’s …
Read More »A New Report Fires an Opening Salvo in Effort to Bring Durbin Cap to Credit Card Fees
By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews The debate over the price merchants pay to accept credit cards may be about to intensify. A new report suggests that capping credit card interchange at 22 cents plus 30.5 basis points per transaction could cut $15 billion from the current total of $33 billion U.S. merchants …
Read More »Visa Reminds Thunder Bay That It’s Still Around as Its Standoff With Wal-Mart Continues
By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Visa Inc. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. say there is no news in their standoff that began July 18 with Wal-Mart kicking Visa out of its three stores in Thunder Bay, Ontario. But Visa over the past several weeks has run a marketing campaign to remind residents of …
Read More »A Small-Merchant Security Program Makes Progress, But Not Without Some Grumbling
By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews A relatively new program geared at shoring up data security at small merchants is making progress toward a crucial January deadline, but not without some full-throated grumbling, if comments and questions at an industry trade show this week in Grapevine, Texas, were any indication. The program, …
Read More »As Fraudsters Rush Online, Identity Becomes the ‘New Currency’ for Illicit Transactions
By Kevin Woodward@DTPaymentNews Criminals stepped up their attacks on e-commerce sites in the second quarter, producing more than 69 million rejected transactions, a stunning 90% increase from the same quarter a year ago, according to the Q2 2016 Cybercrime report recently released by ThreatMetrix. Of these transactions, 23% were payments, …
Read More »Making Sense of the Relentless Tech-Driven Changes in the Merchant-Acquiring Industry
It might be a cliché, but the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same has some validity for merchant acquirers despite the rapid introduction of new technologies and the entrance of new competitors in recent years. For example, the top 10 U.S. merchant acquirers in …
Read More »Visa’s Scharf Feels No Love for the ACH, But Is His Sentiment Based on the Facts?
Visa Inc.’s disdain for the automated clearing house as a competing payments network has been a given for years, but never did it come into focus more than it did last week when the giant card network announced its wide-ranging agreement with PayPal Holdings Inc. The deal smoothed over a …
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