News

April, 2014

• 9 April

  End of Life for Microsoft XP Presents Opportunity for Tablet POS Vendors

  With Microsoft Corp. no longer supporting its Windows XP operating system, companies marketing tablet-based point-of-sale gear and software are hoping to garner more business from small and mid-sized businesses looking to replace POS systems that use the outmoded OS. As expected, computing giant Microsoft ceased support for the 12-year-old XP …
• 9 April

  Mobile Commerce Efforts Vie for Acquirer Attention

    Selling merchants solely on the price and availability of a diverse set of payment processing methods won’t be enough in the next year or so as merchants increasingly turn to those who can help them grow their businesses. That’s the message proponents of mobile marketing and advertising services are …
• 8 April

  With MintChip for Sale, Can Digital Currencies Outlast S&H Green Stamps?

  In the wake of Bitcoin’s continuing problems with price volatility and unstable processors, the future of virtual currencies got even cloudier over the past week on news that the Royal Canadian Mint plans to sell its MintChip digital-currency system.   Rumors that MintChip was on the block had been circulating …
• 8 April

  NACHA’s New Same-Day Settlement Plan Draws Plenty of Questions From a Curious Crowd

  You might call it the first stop on a long road show looming for automated clearing house network oversight body NACHA’s new proposal for same-day settlement of ACH transactions. The particular stop was a packed session at NACHA’s annual payments conference on Tuesday, where executives from financial institutions and payments …
• 7 April

  In the Wake of Its Effort to Tokenize Card Numbers, The Clearing House Turns to the ACH

  The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, which last summer announced its effort to tokenize payment card numbers, is now mulling a related system that would similarly mask sensitive consumer information related to automated clearing house transactions, and may have a proposal ready by year’s end. “It’s something we’ve spent a …
• 7 April

  Leaf Adds a Merchant Services Provider Referral Marketplace

  Tablet-based point-of-sale provider Leaf Holdings Inc. is providing a marketplace to help merchant service providers find merchants. Dubbed Payments Apps, the service provides a free listing with the payment company’s contact information and a description of up to 2,000 characters. Payment companies pay $10 per month per merchant if the …
• 7 April

  NACHA Unveils Opt-In Program To Reduce Exceptions in ACH Bill Payments

  In a further escalation of its war on costly bill-payment exceptions, automated clearing house governing body NACHA on Monday announced a new program that will convert erroneous electronic bill payments that otherwise would go through as paper checks into ACH transactions with a new field where the biller can enter …
• 4 April

  With Abandonment Soaring, Equifax And Jumio Aim To Ease Mobile Commerce Pain

    Consumer affinity for shopping on smart phones and tablets is unlikely to abate any time soon. And that poses a problem for retailers as they try to make the payment experience easier on mobile commerce sites and apps. It’s a problem that credit-reporting agency Equifax Inc. and payments-and-authentication-services provider …
• 3 April

  Exposure to Card Fraud Spikes in 2013 As Shift to EMV Looms, AFP Survey Reports

  Some 43% of businesses report they were exposed to card fraud in 2013, a whopping rise of 14 percentage points from 2012, according to the latest annual fraud survey from the Association of Financial Professionals. Nonetheless, survey respondents are remarkably optimistic about the Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip card standard, with 92% …
• 3 April

  Star Strikes Deal with MasterCard in the Latest Common AID Pairing

  After a string of news from Visa Inc. about partnerships with electronic funds transfer networks to facilitate debit transactions with chip cards, MasterCard Inc. got back in the game Thursday with the announcement that First Data Corp.’s Star network will use MasterCard’s so-called common application identifier (AID). n Visa has …