News

February, 2014

• 10 February

  AmEx Ramps Up Effort To Sign Small Merchants With Its OptBlue Program

  American Express Co. is stepping up its campaign to add small merchants to its acceptance base with a program called OptBlue that gives partner merchant acquirers a greater role than they had with an older program called OnePoint. AmEx started testing OptBlue late last year and revealed details about it …
• 6 February

  Apple Bans Another Bitcoin Wallet, Stirring Protests But Perhaps Boosting Its Own Wallet

  Apple Inc. removed from its vast mobile-applications market called the App Store the Blockchain mobile wallet for accessing the Bitcoin virtual currency, an action Blockchain claims will leave no native Bitcoin options for users of Apple’s iOS mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad. Apple’s move quickly stirred protests …
• 5 February

  Contactless Payment Scheme Enables Consumers to Fill Up on Fuel and Loyalty Points

  A new contactless payment scheme available from On Track Innovations Ltd. enables consumers to pay for fuel at the pump without removing their payment card from their wallets. n Currently, EasyFuel Plus is available in Europe and other international locations. OTI says plans to market it in the United States …
• 5 February

  Chip Standards Body Fast-Tracks New Token Standard in Wake of Target, Other Recent Breaches

  EMVCo., the international standards body for chip cards based on the EMV specification, is fast-tracking a specification for card-number tokenization in the wake of recently disclosed data breaches at major retailers, including the theft of card and other information on 110 million customers of Target Corp. The chip card organization …
• 4 February

  Small-Merchant PCI Compliance Is on the Rise, Acquirer Survey Shows

  Close to 60% of ISOs and other processors are reporting compliance rates of 40% or better among their portfolios of so-called Level 4 merchants, up about five percentage points from a year ago, according to a survey released by Atlanta-based security-solutions vendor ControlScan Inc. and the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, a …
• 4 February

  Target Passed a PCI Inspection Before Breach; Will Spend $100 Million on Chip Card Effort

  Target Corp. said on Tuesday that it passed its latest Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) inspection a mere three months before confirming in December that a data breach compromised 40 million customers’ payment card numbers. Target also said it is fast-tracking its efforts to roll out chip card acceptance …
• 3 February

  Paydiant Expects Another Big Retailer To Debut Its Mobile Payment App Soon

  Another large retailer, with as many as 100,000 locations, will begin using a mobile payments app developed by Paydiant Inc. within the next few weeks, Jed Rice, senior vice president of business development, told attendees at the Northeast Acquirers Association conference last week in West Dover, Vt. n He also …
• 3 February

  Capitol Hill Hearings Will Shine the Spotlight on Payment-Card Security Lapses

  Merchants and financial institutions will find their information-protection practices under intense scrutiny this week in Washington, where no fewer than four Senate and House of Representatives hearings are scheduled in the wake of payment card data breaches at Target Corp., Neiman Marcus Group and other merchants. The sessions kick off …

January, 2014

• 30 January

  Visa Sticks to EMV Deadline; CEO Decries Data-Breach Blame Game and ‘Misinformation’

  Visa Inc. chief executive Charles Scharf on Thursday quelled rumors that the payment network might change its October 2015 liability-shift deadline for Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip card transactions. Scharf also decried what he called “misinformation” and “confusion” about card security following December’s news of Target Corp.’s huge payment card data breach and …
• 30 January

  Alleging Deceptive Pricing Tactics Lured Away Merchants, Heartland Sues Mercury

  Heartland Payment Systems Inc. on Wednesday filed a federal lawsuit against Mercury Payment Systems LLC alleging deceptive pricing by Mercury allowed it to lure scores of merchants away from Heartland and attract prospects to Mercury that had been weighing the two companies for payment-processing services. Heartland’s suit, filed in U.S. …