Debit Cards

Pre-holiday spending volume on Visa cards continued to build in the week through Sunday, with overall transactions increasing 18.8%, to 405.6 million ($22.7 billion in dollar volume), over the same week a year ago. Activity on the Internet and in fast-food chains, two closely watched emerging spending categories, increased 22.5% …

PIN debit transactions are cheaper than debit card transactions secured by signature, incur lower fraud losses, and generate slightly higher average tickets, according to a survey of issuing banks. Taking into account processing costs as well as the cost of back-office fraud-management, chargebacks, settlement, customer service, and accounting functions, the …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has begun accepting cards issued on the Debitman Card Inc. network, a 5-year-old system that allows merchants to issue and accept PIN-secured debit cards and clear transactions through the automated clearing house. Wal-Mart began taking the Debitman card Nov. 1 at all 3,600 U.S. Wal-Mart and Sam's …

Credit Union 24, an electronic funds transfer network based in Tallahassee, Fla. and the country's largest controlled by credit unions, is planning to move its switching service to a new processor in a conversion it says will start next March and will take about nine months. The move will bring …

Whether they like it or not, billers are accepting more credit and signature-based debit card transactions on their Web sites?at the expense of the share of less costly bill payments cleared through the automated clearing house. So-called biller-direct sites?Web sites set up by financial institutions, utility companies, telecommunications carriers and …

Reflecting a recent trend in card-based payments, signature-debit card dollar volume on MasterCard International's U.S. network grew at double-digit rates in the first nine months of the year, far outstripping growth in credit card transactions. MasterCard reported today that its signature, or offline, debit cards in the U.S. accounted for …

Noted in recent years for its strategy of buying assets in high-growth processing niches, TransFirst LLC is back in the hunt, this time looking for a bill-payment processor that can help it create a service for small financial institutions that would allow customers to pay bills on the banks' Web …

Widespread publicity surrounding the huge data breach at CardSystems Solutions Inc., coupled with a movement among the states to require disclosure of data compromises, is driving business for companies specializing in data security. “Consumers are up in arms about enterprises not taking security seriously enough,” says Karim Toubba, vice president …

The United Kingdom's Office of Fair Trading today said interchange fees paid by Visa acquirers to Visa issuers in the U.K. are anti-competitive, an action that could lead to regulatory action against the fee structure. In what it calls a “statement of objections,” the OFT said Visa's interchange structure, formally …

So-called expedited bill payments are rapidly growing in volume in the U.S., and are also becoming increasingly electronic as remote-payment channels like the Internet gain transaction share from traditional walk-in channels. That's one conclusion TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass.-based payments-research firm, has come to in two studies released this week. Expedited …