News

January, 2009

• 30 January

  Can Facebook Grasp the Payments Opportunity Now in Front of It?

  This is the fifth installment of a six-part series on how Web 2.0 is likely to transform the payments business. Prior articles focused on how new providers are leading the transition from the first generation of e-commerce, where a buyer had a one-way relationship with a seller's Web site and …
• 28 January

  Pricing Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story About Merchant Attrition

  Pricing is by far the biggest reason merchants cite when asked why they left their previous payment card processor, but there's more to the attrition story than meets the eye, according to a new study by Aite Group LLC. “Pricing is only the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back,” …
• 28 January

  The Recession Is Sending Rates of Friendly Fraud Up, Processors Say

  With the recession throwing more and more people out of work by the day, payments processors are reporting that their merchants are experiencing sharp increases in e-commerce chargebacks stemming from so-called friendly fraud. This is the fraud that results when a consumer repudiates a transaction as unauthorized in hopes of …
• 27 January

  ‘Difficult’ Times Hammer the Centurion’s Card And Acquiring Results

  The message this week from the top brass at American Express Co. is: Times are bad, but no worse at AmEx than elsewhere in the payments industry. American Express, the third-largest payment card network, is still making money, though a lot less of it: $172 million in the fourth quarter, …
• 26 January

  Credit Losses at Bill Me Later Climb Past 8% But Don’t Faze eBay

  Credit losses at Bill Me Later Inc. are manageable despite the economic downdraft of the past year, officials at eBay Inc. told analysts recently. The Timonium, Md.-based provider of so-called transactional credit for online transactions, which eBay bought last year and paired with its PayPal online-payments unit (Digital Transactions News, …
• 26 January

  Heartland’s Carr Calls for End-to-End Encryption To Stop Breaches

  Nearly one week after news emerged of the big data breach at Princeton, N.J.-based merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc., it remains unclear how much damage actually happened and who did it. One report suggests Heartland's breach-related legal liabilities could approach $98 million, an estimate a Heartland spokesperson dismisses as …
• 22 January

  Watch Gen Yers with iPhones to Figure out Next-Gen Payment Plans

  This is the fourth installment of a six-part series exploring the impact of Web 2.0 on the payments business. Previous articles have dealt with the transition from the first generation of eCommerce to the emerging world of social networks and highly personalized interactions utilizing Web 2.0 technology. Consumers will be …
• 22 January

  Banks’ Card Reissuance Indicates Probable Scope of Heartland Breach

  As merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. and federal investigators continue to probe the data breach Heartland disclosed on Tuesday, evidence is building that banks and credit unions around the country are reissuing cards on a mass scale as a likely result of the breach. That could give credence to …
• 21 January

  New Fax Product Aims at Easing Remote Capture for Low-Volume Users

  The rapidly mounting popularity of a technology that lets businesses process checks by turning them into electronic images for deposit is giving rise to new methods that promise to relieve small businesses of the need to have either traditional check scanners or processing software. The latest example is a product …
• 20 January

  PCI’s Shield Suffers Another Blow As Heartland Reports a Hack

  Merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. reported on Tuesday that it has found malicious software on its processing system, the result of a breach that happened in 2008 but which Heartland says is now contained. The malware captured an unknown quantity of card numbers and expiration dates along with a …