Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
After being out all day Tuesday, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s online-banking service sputtered back to life early Wednesday. Service, however, was spotty at times, though by mid-afternoon it seemed to be working normally again. But with 16.6 million active online-banking customers potentially affected, the outage was big enough to warrant …
Read More »Advice to Issuers: Shift from Debit to Credit—And Soon
Hammered by the worst economic downturn in decades, consumers have been abandoning credit cards in droves, instead using debit cards as their plastic of choice. But new research suggests card issuers will soon have to revamp their credit card programs and beef up prepaid card marketing to offset an expected …
Read More »Visa Guidance Targets Slipshod Payment Card Software Practices
Recognizing that sloppy payment-processing software installations can lead to data breaches, Visa Inc. on Tuesday issued what it calls the top 10 best practices for secure software management. Visa is aiming the guidance mostly at third-party software vendors, integrators, value-added resellers (VARs), and others that sell or license card-processing applications …
Read More »Two Years in Coming, an IRS Reporting Rule Takes Effect
While the payment card industry is bracing for debit card interchange and other regulations that will come next year from the Federal Reserve as a result of the new financial-reform law, merchant acquirers on Monday got a long-anticipated reporting rule. Beginning with the 2011 tax year, acquirers must report how …
Read More »PCI Council Tweaks Rules to Clarify Issues Like Scope of Assessment
The PCI Security Standards Council on Thursday gave a sneak peek at planned changes in the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI. While a Council document outlines 15 planned changes, the proposals are “relatively minor,” according to a news release. “The No. 1 thing again is greater clarity on …
Read More »Study: About One-Fifth of Breached Entities Were PCI-Compliant
Supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. Inc. stunned the electronic-payments world when it revealed that it had passed its most recent audit for compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) before hackers breached its computer systems and compromised more than 4 million card numbers (Digital Transactions News, March 18, 2008). …
Read More »Visa Hopes It Can Come to Terms with the Justice Department
Barely a week after Congress landed a hard left punch on the card networks, the U.S. Department of Justice might be about to land a right in the form of a lawsuit challenging network rules aimed at preventing merchants from surcharging for credit card payments or otherwise steering customers toward …
Read More »NRF And Visa, Often at Odds, Come Together on Storage Rules
Not always the best of friends, the National Retail Federation and Visa Inc. saw fit on Wednesday to jointly announce that Visa had clarified its card-number storage rules to affirm that merchants may present a truncated or disguised number on a transaction receipt for dispute resolution in place of a …
Read More »Online Game, Social Network Sites Confront Unique Fraud Challenges
Most of the public attention on online fraud centers on traditional merchants seeking to identify fraudulent orders, detect and prevent data breaches, and the like. But fraud also is a major concern for the online-game publishers and social networks that operate exclusively in the virtual world. Because of the unique …
Read More »High-Profile Players Sign on to Promote Mobile-Merchant Technology
As the young market for mobile payments on smart phones takes shape, industry players are scrambling to pair up with world-famous partners with massive numbers of consumer and business customers. Point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc., for example, is selling hardware for its PAYware Mobile application in Apple Inc.’s retail …
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