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Direct charges to subscribers' bills and credit and debit cards will account for the bulk of mobile payments in five years, with today's preferred method, short-message-service (SMS) payments, dropping to a minority of transactions, a survey released this week indicates. Only 6% of respondents to the survey, attendees at a …
Read More »With New Web Service, Xoom Targets the Giants of Money Transfer
Armed with $15 million in new venture capital, San Francisco-based Xoom Corp. is embarking on the next phase of its growth plan: selling Internet-based money-transfer services to banks, retailers and smaller money-transfer operators (MTOs) that can put their own brands on them and sell them to consumers. Founded in 2002, …
Read More »BidPay Re-launches with New Pricing, Chargeback Policy
BidPay.com Inc., an online auction-payment processor that was shut down in December by owner First Data Corp., went live again this week with new pricing, international sales support, and a strategy to appeal to sellers by offering protection against certain chargebacks. The re-launch follows the March 2006 acquisition of BidPay …
Read More »Patent in Hand, Yahoo! Moves Toward a P2P Payments Product
Online search giant Yahoo! Inc. is developing what appears to be a person-to-person payment service and may be weeks away from introducing it, but details of the new service remain unclear. A spokesperson for Yahoo! told Digital Transactions News this week the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company was “not ready to discuss” …
Read More »PayPal Mobile Launches with Five Merchants, More in ‘Pipleline’
PayPal Inc. today officially joined the race for mobile-phone transactions, announcing the commercial availability of its much-anticipated PayPal Mobile service. The product, word of which leaked two weeks ago while the San Jose, Calif.-based processor was testing it with its own employees and those of parent company eBay Inc., comes …
Read More »Phishing Blasts, Web Sites Soar at Double-Digit Rates in January
The phishing trend, which took an ominous turn upward in the closing days of 2005, has grown even more menacing, with both the number of phishing-related e-mails and the number of Web sites hosting phishing attacks increasing by double-digit percentages in January, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing …
Read More »P2P Market Is Nice, But PayPal Mobile May Have to Reach Merchants
PayPal Inc.'s new payment service for mobile phones, which the eBay Inc. processing unit is expected to launch commercially within a few weeks, will have to offer more than basic person-to-person payments to be a success, one expert observer says. “I think it will need to go beyond just P2P …
Read More »TextPayMe Aims Its Nascent Cell-Phone P-to-P Service at Web Markets
A tiny startup in Redmond, Wash., has signed up about 500 users for its week-old person-to-person payment service based on mobile phones and expects to launch a commercial service in 2006. With a head count of three, including two former Microsoft Corp. employees, TextPayMe Inc. allows individuals with cell phones …
Read More »PayPal Stuck at About 70% in eBay Volume, Though Accounts Boom
PayPal Inc. may be trying to process more transactions for e-commerce sites independent of its parent company, giant online auctioneer eBay Inc., but its latest quarterly figures indicate it still depends on eBay's auction activity for 69% of its transaction volume, a ratio that has remained virtually unchanged for months. …
Read More »New Online Processor GreenZap Looks to Credit Card Funding for Growth
GreenZap Inc., a San Diego, Calif.-based processor of e-mail payments that started up this summer as the latest competitor to PayPal Inc., has added acceptance of Visa and MasterCard cards to fund accounts, a move the company says will help it to more than double transaction volume. “The integration of …
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