Pricing

The Reserve Bank of Australia is likely to mandate zero interchange for debit card transactions at the point of sale linked to personal identification numbers in that country, according to a report in The Age, an Australian news service. This action if taken would follow the Australian central bank's decision …

Canada's five major banks next spring will roll out a service that will allow consumers to pay for goods and services on the Internet with debit cards linked to personal identification numbers. The service, called iDebit, has been at least 18 months in the making and is expected to be …

Retailers who object to current levels of interchange fees on electronic transactions often argue the levy forces them to charge consumers more for goods in their stores, driving up prices and penalizing customers. But a recent report out of Australia undercuts that argument. It finds that prices did not decline …

Defenders of interchange for electronic credit and debit transactions argue merchants are losing sight of the value interchange pays for. The subject of interchange has become hotly contested in the wake of lawsuits by retailers challenging it or aspects of it, and following recent interchange hikes by the bank card …

Competition in the nascent market for micropayments, or transactions of $5 or less, is about to become even more heated. A 10-year-old maker of e-commerce systems for retailers says it is 30 to 45 days away from introducing a micropayments product that will be tied to prepaid consumer accounts and …

Severe price compression in the merchant acquiring market drove together two major players and led to further consolidation in the merchant-processing business as Bank of America Corp. today announced it has acquired National Processing Inc.for $1.4 billion in cash. BofA says it will combine its Merchant Services unit with NPC …

A Cincinnati-based company that specializes in the repair and refurbishment of ATMs has won a comprehensive class of approval from Visa International for a device it invented to bring installed ATMs into compliance with new card-network security protocols. The approval from Visa means any older ATM incorporating the device will …

MusicRebellion.com Inc., which operates a 3-year-old Web site selling song downloads, is getting set to adopt an updated version of a micropayments system to help handle growing volume. The Web merchant, which has been using Peppercoin Inc.'s original processing system, introduced last year, says the micropayment method accounts for between …

Official Payments Corp., a Stamford, Conn.-based processor that specializes in payments to government entities, has announced it is now processing electronic checks on the Internet, with settlement through the automated clearing house. The company, which quietly began the service in December and is now trafficking e-checks for 34 government agencies, …

In an ambitious effort to capture a share of the rapidly expanding markets for both digital content and goods at the point of sale, micropayments processor Peppercoin Inc. today is announcing a second generation of the payments model it introduced commercially only last December. Considerably revised, the Waltham, Mass.-based company's …