News

September, 2014

• 4 September

  The U.S. EMV Migration Produces a Windfall for POS Terminal Producer VeriFone

  It’s a good time to be a point-of-sale terminal maker when all of your customers have to go through the payments equivalent of abandoning the horse and buggy and jumping into an automobile. With a major U.S. deadline for converting from magnetic-stripe payment cards to the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card …
• 4 September

  Home Depot Hires Data-Security Firms As Other Merchants Contend With Breaches

    Big box hardware retailer The Home Depot Inc. has hired two data-security firms to delve into its point-of-sale systems to determine the extent of a possible breach first reported on Tuesday. Security site KrebsOnSecurity.com said then that several banks it contacted said they saw evidence that Home Depot stores …
• 3 September

  Eye on Branding: As Wallets Struggle, MCX Dubs Its Scheme CurrentC While Isis Says It Is Now Softcard

    The Merchant Customer Exchange, a retailer-controlled mobile payment scheme, has given its service a name. Dubbed CurrentC, the service will not be available outside of testing until 2015. First announced in 2012, the long-gestating scheme aims to give participating retailers their own mobile-wallet service that eschews the traditional payment …
• 2 September

  Often Linked to Mobile Payments, Location-Based Rewards Aren’t Rewarding for Everyone

  Mobile-payments providers have looked to offers and rewards as a means of engaging with consumers and merchants and boosting payments activity. Indeed, most mobile strategists value the technology’s ability to deliver rewards at the moment consumers are in the store, if not necessarily in front of the relevant merchandise. But …
• 2 September

  Rumors Cast Apple’s Prospective Role as a Payments Provider as a Done Deal

  In case you spent the entire Labor Day long weekend in a fishing boat on a remote lake, you could barely miss the stories moving over the business wires in recent days about Apple Inc. and electronic payments. In sum, the iconic computer maker and iTunes and App Store provider …

August, 2014

• 28 August

  Looking To Expand Beyond Digital Markets, Boku Gets a Read on Magazine Subscriptions

  Ever since the carrier-billing model for mobile payments found a foothold in the digital-goods market several years ago, processors have tested various tactics to broaden the range of goods the model could be applied to. The latest example is San Francisco-based Boku Inc. and its announcement Thursday that it will …
• 28 August

  Visa Brings Big Acquirers on Board To Build Momentum for Its New Visa Checkout Service

  Visa Inc. on Wednesday said eight merchant acquirers and e-commerce platform providers will be rolling out the 1-month-old Visa Checkout online and mobile payment service. With three platform providers already offering the service, up to 4 million U.S. online merchants will be able use Visa Checkout, Visa claims. The acquirers …
• 26 August

  Citi Scores a Digital-Wallet First for U.S. Banks, But Will Consumers Care?

  Citigroup Inc. claims to have become the first global bank to introduce its own branded wallet in the U.S. The question now is how much Citi’s millions of payment card holders will care as digital-wallet services proliferate. The new Citi Wallet announced Monday is based on MasterCard Inc.’s MasterPass platform, …
• 26 August

  Effective in 2015, Two New ACH Rules Will Change Returns Threshold, Impose New Fees

  The regulatory body for the automated clearing house network on Tuesday unveiled two new network rules that, among other changes, will lower a key threshold for unauthorized returns, impose new fees on originating banks for unauthorized debits, and hand new enforcement authority to the ACH regulator, Herndon, Va.-based NACHA. The …
• 25 August

  Don’t Expect Apple To Radically Remake Electronic Payments, Researcher Says

  Apple Inc. is expected to release its iPhone 6 next month and, not surprisingly, speculation about the coming smart phone’s features is intense. But a new report from IDC Financial Insights cautions that Apple is not out to reshape the mobile-payments industry. Many of the rumors in payments circles center …