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Merchants increasingly are complaining about the rising cost of accepting PIN-debit transactions, once by far the cheapest payment they could process from any piece of plastic. Now, data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City show why: the cost of accepting PIN-debit cards rose 305% between 1996 and …
Read More »Kemesa Looks to Banks to Help Sell Its New Online Security Tool
Kemesa LLC entered the war on online fraud on Monday with a product that allows consumers to pay e-commerce merchants using so-called anonymous data that would be useless to cyber thieves. The Aventura, Fla.-based startup says it plans to market the product to consumers through their financial institutions and is …
Read More »Seeking Easier Prey, Fraudsters Attack Call Centers to Loot Accounts
Faced with more stringent authentication procedures for online financial transactions, criminals are turning to call centers to commit fraud via the phone channel, according to RSA, the Security Division of EMC. Although call-center fraud still is a small percentage of total Internet fraud, it is “definitely growing,” says Joram Borenstein, …
Read More »Issuer Cutbacks Result in 104 Million Fewer U.S. Credit Cards
Profits and overall transaction volumes are still growing for Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., but the bank card networks' latest quarterly numbers show just how severe the cutback by recession-racked credit card issuers is becoming. In fact, there are about 104 million fewer credit cards circulating in the U.S. today …
Read More »Pain on Main Street: A First-Ever Drop in Card-Based Same-Store Sales
As the recession continues to batter merchants of all sizes, small and medium-size retailers are getting hit especially hard, and as a result so are the acquirers that process their card transactions. Indeed, in a development apparently never seen before, same-store sales on Visa and MasterCard for these Main Street …
Read More »A Startup Builds on Cap One’s Decoupled Debit Program to Run Rewards
A company founded by the man behind Capital One Financial Corp.'s decoupled debit program is introducing what it terms a “next-generation debit rewards” system that allows banks to provide cost-free rewards to cardholders. Under the system developed by Atlanta-based Cardlytics, merchants fund rewards that will be offered to banks' online-banking …
Read More »PCI Council Releases Guidelines for Wireless Network Security
Nearly a year after ordering the phase-out of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), a technology introduced in 1999 to protect data flowing over wireless networks, the PCI Security Standards Council this week released new guidelines for enhanced wireless security. The so-called Payment Card Industry data security standard wireless, written by the …
Read More »Interac Connects With Contactless Debit Payments
Canada's Interac Association debit network is teaming with France-based semiconductor manufacturer Inside Contactless in a partnership that will include a test next year that will pair PIN-based debit cards with contactless payments. But to keep transactions moving quickly, cardholders will not need to enter a PIN. The test will be …
Read More »An Information Gap Sparks a Dust-Up over Remote Key Injection
Is MasterCard Inc. putting the kibosh on a new technology called remote key injection that makes it easier to enhance the security of point-of-sale payment terminals? That's the impression some payments executives got after reading an online Computerworld article Wednesday that said MasterCard was insisting on manual injection of security …
Read More »How Verient Combines Security And Customization in Cards
Verient Inc. is the startup behind SafeDebit, NYCE Payments Network LLC's effort to allow consumers to use their NYCE cards on the Internet (Digital Transactions News, July 2), but the company's ambitions go well beyond enabling debit-based e-commerce. By the end of the year, it expects to have between 3,000 …
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