Marketing

Only one-fifth of financial institutions are using technologies that can authenticate e-mail messages, even though phishing attacks disproportionately affect banks and even though banks say they plan to rely more heavily on the e-mail channel to reach customers, a new research report says. Meanwhile, phishing attacks are not only increasing, …

Green, as in save the environment, and green, as in cash, can be two effective appeals financial institutions can use to persuade consumers to pay bills electronically through bank Web sites, though banks should be especially careful about cash incentives, researchers claim. And the security worries consumers express about electronic …

Recent research by Aite Group LLC estimated the Visa and MasterCard bank card networks paid nearly $5 billion to merchants and card issuers between 2005 and 2007 to spur acceptance or issuance of their respective brands (Digital Transactions News, Feb. 20). Visa Inc.'s latest registration statement, filed Monday in advance …

Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …

An absence of incentives?particularly for merchants?is handicapping contactless payments in the U.S., and by extension mobile payment at the point of sale could suffer, according to a new report. About 40,000 U.S. merchants now accept contactless cards and fobs, or 0.5% of all merchant locations. That number will grow to …

A test of contactless payment via mobile phones, launched this week in San Francisco, relies on near-field communication (NFC) technology not only to handle transactions but also to manage consumer rewards. It differs from past NFC pilots in the U.S. in another way: It doesn't rely on either the MasterCard …

The population of Web sites dedicated to the crime of phishing jumped markedly in October after dipping late in the summer, according to the latest data from the Anti-Phishing Working Group. The good news, though, is that experts appear to be working out a new way to shut down these …

Biometric-authentication and loyalty-services technology provider Pay By Touch is in bankruptcy, has cut costs drastically, and is shopping some of its subsidiaries, but the company's former chief executive–who is now a member of the firm's newly constituted board of directors–says Pay By Touch is solid at its core. “This company …

While holiday-season shopping activity overall for 2007 may have seen only a lukewarm increase compared to last year, purchases online surged ahead, reaching their peak a week before Christmas. On Dec. 18, online sales for 10 of the 30 largest e-commerce merchants hit $169 million on more than 3 million …

Some 3.6 million U.S. adults were victims of phishing attacks in the 12 months ending in August, losing an average of $886 apiece for an estimated total of $3.2 billion, according to a survey of more than 4,500 online users sponsored by Gartner Inc. Gartner, a technology research firm based …