Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Online retailers have long deployed front-end screening systems to check card-not-present transactions for fraud. A new software product announced Tuesday, however, is apparently the first commercially available product to automate what is now a heavily manual process of checking orders that don't pass these screens and yet are not unambiguously …
Read More »Alternative Payments Are Gaining Online, But Not All Retailers Are Sold
The share of e-commerce dollars coming from so-called alternative payment methods will grow from 12% in 2005 to 26% in 2009, an electronic-payments expert says. And two such alternatives emerging only now will gain momentum over the coming three years, with PIN debit accounting for about 3% and NACHA's new …
Read More »ISOs And NFC Specs Lend Impetus to Contactless Payment Trend
New technical specifications for so-called near-field communication (NFC), released this week by an international rules-setting body backing the technology, should add momentum in the U.S. to the trend toward contactless payments on mobile phones. “A lot's happening behind closed doors,” says Erik Michielsen, director of RFID and M2M research at …
Read More »CyberSource Bids to Relieve Online Retailers’ PCI Headaches
In a bid to meet what appears to be a clear market demand for services to help online merchants satisfy card-data security rules, CyberSource Corp. Tuesday launched a product that removes merchants from the business of handling and storing payment data. The move comes as merchants and processors increasingly find …
Read More »Swiped Laptops Now a Threat in Data Breaches Plaguing Payments
The drumbeat of data-breach disclosures continued Friday with the news that information linked to about 65,000 individuals?including credit and debit card data–were exposed when a burglar broke into a locked office in a YMCA facility in Providence, R.I., last week and stole a laptop containing the sensitive member information. According …
Read More »Newly Private iPayment Logs Profit Jump, Points to CardSystems Fallout
The final quarterly filing from iPayment Inc. as a public company contains a report of a double-digit gain in profit at the Nashville, Tenn.-based merchant acquirer as well as a terse reference to what amounts to continuing fallout from the huge data breach last year at Atlanta-based merchant processor CardSystems …
Read More »Home Depot: No Designs on Payments with Deal to Buy ILC
In sharp contrast to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., leading home-improvement retailer Home Depot Inc. professes no intentions of getting into the payments business even though, like Wal-Mart, it plans to operate a Utah-chartered industrial loan corporation, or ILC, that would give it an entrée into financial services. Less than a month …
Read More »Heartland Drives up Net with Expanded Merchant Base, Card Volume
Heartland Payment Systems Inc., one of the few publicly traded independent sales organizations, today reported its revenues jumped 39% in the first quarter, to $236.8 million, on a 34% increase in transaction volume, to $9.2 billion. Net income for the period came to $4.39 million, a 63% increase. The Princeton, …
Read More »As Its IPO Awaits, MasterCard Logs Strong Results, Names Directors
With its long-expected initial public offering of stock fast approaching, MasterCard Inc. reported strong results for the first quarter and indicated it expects its stock to sell for between $40 and $43 per share. It also named six new directors who will join its board of directors after it becomes …
Read More »Eye on RFID: Utah Transit, Arby’s Plan for Contactless Payment
The Utah Transit Authority in November will begin accepting contactless payment tokens in a pilot project that will represent the first use of contactless technology to process bus fares in the U.S. The Salt Lake City-based transit agency in September will begin equipping 41 buses that ferry passengers to local …
Read More »