Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Mobile payments may be a nascent business fraught with uncertainty, but Starbucks Coffee Co. seems to have found a key to success. Last week, the company revealed that more than 3 million transactions have taken place on its smart-phone-based prepaid payments system, which became available in all U.S. company-owned stores …
March, 2011
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30 March
Buried by Letters, the Fed Delays Issuing Its Debit Card Rules
Overwhelmed by the volume of comments it received, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on Tuesday said in letters to Congress the Fed would miss Congress’s April 21 deadline to have issued final debit card interchange and network regulations. Bernanke, however, said the Fed still plans to meet the …
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30 March
Consumers Nearly Carefree When It Comes to Smart-Phone Security
With much of the payments industry and Silicon Valley tech press in a speculative frenzy about what Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. might or might not do regarding mobile payments, a new study has come along indicating that consumers are complacent, arguably extremely complacent, about protecting personal and …
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29 March
Relax, Banks. Google Just Wants NFC for Its Advertising Potential, Experts Say
A mobile-payments system from Google Inc. may strengthen the search giant’s hand in marketing but will pose little threat to established payments networks, according to experts contacted by Digital Transactions News. The Google venture, more news of which emerged this week, has surprised some observers because it includes MasterCard Inc. …
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28 March
AmEx Serves Up a New Digital Payment System with a Prepaid Card
American Express Co. on Monday launched Serve, a multifaceted online and offline payment system centered on a digital account and reloadable prepaid card that facilitate person-to-person payments as well as physical, online, and mobile purchases. AmEx says a key advantage of the digital account is that it is funding-agnostic, meaning …
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25 March
RSA Breach Sends ‘Wake-up Call’ About Vulnerability of Two-Factor Authentication
It’s big news, not to mention a major embarrassment, when a leader in data security itself becomes a victim of a serious breach. That was the case for RSA, which stores the tokens widely used by financial institutions as a second factor of authentication for online-payment transactions. In the breach—announced …
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25 March
Look, Ma, No NFC: Parking Payment Via a Smart Phone App
It was only a matter of time before mobile payments came to the parking industry. And no, the latest application doesn’t depend on near-field communication (NFC), a contactless technology that has been ensnarled in endless disputes between banks and mobile operators and is reportedly being eyed by high-flying players like …
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23 March
Accertify Launches a Tool to Let Merchants Automate Chargeback Processing
Accertify Inc. this week announced a service aimed at automating most of the functions merchants must follow to contest a chargeback, regardless of the payment method used for the original transaction. The Accertify Chargeback Service has begun a beta test with two unnamed clients and will be commercially available by …
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23 March
How Prepaid Cards Could Help Issuers Recover Some Income Lost to Durbin
As debit card issuers move to impose new fees or trim back rewards in response to looming federal restrictions on interchange income, they may be ignoring an opportunity to recover as much as half of that interchange without levying a single new fee. That’s according to research released this week …
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21 March
Visa Adds POS Data to CyberSource’s Fraud Detection for Online Merchants
Visa Inc. and electronic-commerce fraud-control and gateway services provider CyberSource Corp. on Monday introduced an enhanced risk-scoring service for online merchants, the first major jointly developed product from the two since Visa bought CyberSource last year. The service will augment CyberSource’s existing risk-assessment system by bringing in data from the …