News

February, 2007

• 28 February

  Visa Chief Lays out Prepaid Plan, Calls for Outreach to Regulators

  Visa USA's chief executive on Wednesday outlined a multimarket strategy for prepaid cards, while announcing that convenience-store titan 7-Eleven Inc. has joined Visa's fledgling prepaid reload network and calling for greater efforts to educate regulators about the unique characteristics of prepaid plastic. “There's an incredible opportunity [in the prepaid market],” …
• 27 February

  Police Arrest Four in Stop & Shop Breach As Legislation Looms

  Hackers frequently go free, but Coventry, R.I., police late Monday night arrested four California men suspected in the recent theft of debit and credit card data from PIN pads at grocery-store chain Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos. While the arrests are certainly good news to Stop & Shop and banks, …
• 26 February

  New Service Launches to Let Cash Customers Pay Online Merchants

  A startup processor on Monday launched a service intended to allow consumers to pay online merchants with cash. Retail Expansion Network Inc., Oakland, Calif., says its PaidByCash service will attract consumers who are reluctant to use credit cards online or who don't have bank accounts, and will be cheaper for …
• 22 February

  FDC Exits Money Orders As Prepaid Cards, Walk-in Bill Pay Make Gains

  Leading payment processor First Data Corp. said on Thursday it would gradually exit the money-order and official-check businesses, a move some analysts see as a landmark in the growth of prepaid cards and electronic bill payment by consumers lacking traditional bank accounts. “Money orders are in big trouble,” says research …
• 22 February

  Getting Over the Inevitability of Alternative Payments

  10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 8 From the way alternative-payment options are treated by the big players in the electronic- payments industry, you would think these options carried infectious diseases. Not long ago, a payments executive on the treasury side of a major national retailer lamented that …
• 21 February

  TJX Reports Wider Breach, But No Data on Affected Accounts

  Off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. on Wednesday divulged more information about the intrusion into its computer network that contained credit and debit card data, but one piece of information still eludes public disclosure: the actual number of accounts compromised. Earlier estimates put the figure as high as 40 million (Digital …
• 21 February

  Fees for Last-Minute Payments Drop As Banks Build Customer Base

  With consumer fees rapidly trending downward, expedited bill payment may be turning into more of a service to cement customer relationships than a source of revenue. Indeed, the median fee for the service is now zero, compared to $2.50 in 2005, according to survey research recently completed by Javelin Strategy …
• 20 February

  Stop & Shop’s PIN Pad Breach Follows Similar Cases in Canada

  Although many details remain unclear, a security breach at a big supermarket chain in the Northeast bears some resemblance to a sophisticated rigging of point-of-sale equipment to capture PINs and other card data last year in Canada. Quincy, Mass.-based Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos., which has 385 stores in New …
• 19 February

  Community Banks See ‘Survival,’ New Business in Remote Capture

  Some 16% of community banks offer remote deposit capture of checks to business customers, and nearly one-third of these say they have adopted the electronic check technology as “an essential survival strategy,” according to a survey released on Monday by the American Bankers Association. At the same time, 65% of …
• 16 February

  The Illogical Battle Between PIN Debit And Signature Debit

  10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 7 Bubbling like a witch's cauldron in the heart of the electronic payments industry's turmoil over signature cards is the strange and self-destructive contention between the two primary ways of getting funds out of your checking accounts with a bank card. Banks …