E-Commerce

Evidence is mounting that criminal attacks on e-commerce via keyloggers and other code that detects user credentials are growing rapidly. The number of URLs used to disseminate such malware soared to a record 6,500 in March, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group. That's nearly double the …

Continuing its conquest of the nation's air carriers, PayPal Inc. reports that it is now accepted on Continental Airlines Inc.'s Web site. Houston-based Continental's acceptance of PayPal leaves the nation's two largest carriers, American and United, as the only big domestic holdouts. Besides newly booked Continental, which claims to be …

It lost in Congress, so now the merchant-acquiring industry is looking to the bureaucracy to help soften the blow of a new federal reporting requirement that becomes effective in 2011. The requirement, part of the massive mortgage-relief bill President Bush signed into law a month ago, will force the card …

NACHA's Secure Vault Payment (SVP) system, which was built to authenticate and process online payments for merchants and billers, may be finding some acceptance among an unlikely constituency: universities and colleges. The University of Georgia will likely begin accepting tuition fees through SVP after the first of the year, followed …

Hoping to cut its paper-bill costs, AT&T Inc. has quietly made electronic bill payment available to its AT&T Mobility mobile-device customers that have deposit accounts with the more than 3,000 financial institutions that use the e-bill services of bank processor Fiserv Inc.'s CheckFree subsidiary. AT&T Mobility, formerly Cingular Wireless, and …

Universal Air Travel Plan's alternative-payments initiative added a fifth processor this week with the announcement that Acculynk Inc. will process PIN debit transactions online for airlines that choose to enable the option through UATP's switch. The news not only further's UATP's 3-year-old effort to add alternatives to credit cards for …

Banks, merchants, and others that have developed e-commerce channels can't rest easy even though Internet Service Providers and corporations are making progress in plugging a yawning hole in the underpinnings of the Internet that can allow hackers to hijack the customers of virtually any Web site. That's the assessment of …

This is the second installment of a six-part series exploring the growing economic tensions and structural conflicts between acquirers and issuers in the bank card business. All merchants are not created equal in payments. One of the industry's biggest but worst-kept secrets is that in 2003, following the settlement of …

Amazon.com Inc., the nation's largest Internet retailer, became a larger force in the online-payments market on Tuesday when it unveiled two services that give merchants and consumers more alternatives to eBay Inc.'s PayPal and Google Inc.'s Google Checkout, not to mention the general-purpose credit cards. Both services, dubbed Checkout by …

This article begins a six-part series by industry analyst Steve Mott that examines the growing economic tensions and structural conflicts that are drawing the acquiring side of the card processing business into a sustained battle with card issuers. Five Digital Transactions News installments assess the divergent impacts of this conflict …