News

June, 2012

• 12 June

  Speculation Ends As Apple Unveils a Digital Wallet That Works with QR Codes

  Ending months of speculation about is intentions in mobile payments and promotions, computer icon Apple Inc. on Monday entered the increasingly crowded market for digital wallets with an application it calls Passbook. At the same time, the company announced it now has card credentials for some 400 million users on …
• 12 June

  Jury Nails VeriFone in Software Patent Case But Clears Rival Ingenico

  A little software company gone bust won big against leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. in a patent-infringement verdict June 8. A federal jury in Texas found after a five-day trial that VeriFone infringed on two patents held by CardSoft Inc. and awarded damages and royalties of $15.4 million. …
• 12 June

  Global Payments Breach Exposes Data From Applicants for Merchant Accounts

  The hackers who broke into merchant processor Global Payments Inc.’s computer systems added a new chapter to the disreputable history of data breaches by gaining access to information from applicants for merchant accounts, the company disclosed late Tuesday. Global’s revelation apparently is the first publicly known incidence of merchant-applicant information …
• 11 June

  Mobile-Payments Startup LevelUp Blazes a New Trail in Merchant Pricing

  In what may be a harbinger of things to come in mobile-payments pricing models, Boston-based LevelUp has dropped its merchant-acceptance fee from 2% of the transaction to zero. Instead, the company will earn merchant fees of 35 cents per dollar of incremental sales generated by the redemption of rewards earned …
• 8 June

  ACH Transaction Volumes Might Be Headed for a ‘New Normal’

  Driven by fast growth in “native payments” that dispense entirely with paper checks, total automated clearing house network volume increased 4.4% in the first quarter over the year-earlier period, the ACH network’s highest quarterly increase since 2008’s fourth quarter. Michael Herd, managing director of network rules at ACH governing body …
• 6 June

  New Network Required to Mine Full Potential in Mobile Payments, Report Argues

  Marketing revenue from mobile payments has the potential to dwarf payments revenue, as pundits have been saying for some time, but that potential will never be realized unless a new sort of payment network is built, argues a new report. Existing networks like Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., not to …
• 5 June

  List of Penn Station Restaurants Possibly Hit by Data Breach Grows

  The Penn Station East Coast Subs submarine-sandwich restaurant chain says 59 of its 238 locations are now “potentially affected” by a debit and credit card data breach. Parent company Penn Station Inc. first said when it disclosed the breach June 1 that 43 franchisee-owned stores possibly were affected, but the …
• 5 June

  By Mating GoPayment with QuickBooks POS, Intuit Could Steal a March on Square

  Intuit Inc.’s announcement on Tuesday that it has integrated its GoPayment mobile-payment processing application with its QuickBooks Point of Sale 2013 software is expected to make GoPayments more appealing to small businesses than rival products from the likes of Square Inc. and PayPal Inc. Earlier this week, Square announced that …
• 4 June

  Eye on Mobile: Consumers Like Non-Bank Wallets; Android Stays on Top

  Nearly half of consumers are interested in using mobile wallets, and they are not necessarily wedded to wallet products from banks, according to research released on Monday. Indeed, some 48% of U.S. consumers surveyed online in April said they are interested in mobile wallets. Of these, 80% expressed a preference …
• 4 June

  With New Retail Deals, Square Doubles Locations That Sell Its Card Readers

  Merchant processor Square Inc. doubled the number of physical stores at which its now-famous payment card reader for mobile devices can be purchased with Monday’s announcement that the reader is available at Walgreen Co., Staples Inc., and FedEx Corp.’s FedEx Office stores. The three new merchants collectively add 10,000 locations: …