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Continuing its massive clean-up in the wake of the payment card industry’s biggest data breach, merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. late on Wednesday announced a $41.4 million settlement with MasterCard Inc. The settlement will reimburse MasterCard debit and credit card issuers for their costs stemming from the breach Heartland …
Read More »Questions Arise in the Wake of Durbin’s Winning Amendment
Payments-industry partisans of all stripes got onto their soap boxes on Friday and Monday to praise or denounce U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin’s successful amendment that could pave the way for regulation of debit card interchange and acceptance terms. Merchant interests basked in the surprisingly large (64-33) victory they scored late …
Read More »Interchange Rules Close in as Senate Okays Debit Card Amendment
Interchange regulation is one step closer to reality after the U.S. Senate late on Thursday approved an amendment that would require the Federal Reserve to determine “reasonable and proportional” transaction fees for debit cards. Banks earn an estimated $15 billion annually from debit card interchange fees. The Senate approved the …
Read More »Visa’s Big PIN-Debit Rate Hike Further Closes Gap with Signature Debit
The gap in acceptance costs between PIN-based and signature debit, once wide, continues to narrow, payments executives say. The trend is most apparent in the new interchange schedules for Visa Inc.’s Interlink electronic funds transfer network and the signature-based Visa check card. A number of Interlink rates are rising by …
Read More »PCI Council Consolidates PIN-Entry Standards into One Set of Rules
The PCI Security Standards Council on Wednesday released updated guidelines governing PIN-entry devices that incorporate all the rules into a single set of requirements. Previously, there were three separate sets of requirements for point-of-sale PIN entry devices (PED), encrypting PIN pads (EPP), and unattended payment terminals (UPT). Version 3.0 of …
Read More »PINless Debit, Card Acceptance for Consumers from Obopay
Online PINless debit transactions could get a boost if a package of four new mobile-payments services from Obopay Inc. proves to be a hit. Dubbed Mobile Money for Banks, Obopay’s new white-label service has another interesting twist besides PINless debit in that it will enable consumers to accept payment cards. …
Read More »Volume Perks up for Heartland, While Breach Costs Exceed $100 Million
Reflecting recent trends noted by the payment card networks, merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc. reported on Thursday that it is beginning to see a turnaround in charge volume at merchants battered for the past two years by the retrenchment in consumer spending. Heartland also disclosed that it has expensed …
Read More »Even Vendors See a Far-off Horizon for End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption of payment card data is all the rage among vendors to the merchant-acquiring industry, but vendors themselves believe it will take a long time for merchants to begin using their new technology. Asked how long they believe it will take for the majority of U.S. card-accepting merchants to …
Read More »MasterCard Aims for Faster Authorizations, More Message Data
While Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. are shelling out big bucks for the loyalties of card issuers and merchants (Digital Transactions News, April 29), they’re also adding technological muscle to attract more transaction volume to their networks. In the latest example, MasterCard on Monday announced a host of upgrades to …
Read More »As Its PayPal Program Unfolds, Star Zeroes in on Online PIN Debit
Six months after announcing it will process online PIN-debit transactions through PayPal Inc., the Star electronic funds transfer network has signed a number of member banks for the new service, with “implementations in progress,” says Julie Saville, vice president for product management at Star. Despite the tie-up with PayPal, however, …
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