Transaction Processing

  The funk at VeriFone Systems Inc. continued late Wednesday when the leading point-of-sale terminal maker said revenues and profits for its first quarter of fiscal 2013 ended Jan. 31 would come in far short of earlier predictions. The downward forecast triggered a selloff in VeriFone’s shares, whose price was …

  n The report, which covers the third quarter of last year, documents a steady decline in both the number of unique sites hosting phishing attacks and the volume of reported attacks. The number of phishing sites detected by the APWG fell in step-like fashion from 63,253 in April to …

No stranger to prepaid cards, payment card processor Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) will become a major force in the prepaid niche with its planned cash acquisition of program manager NetSpend Holdings Inc. that values NetSpend at $1.4 billion. The deal the two companies announced late Tuesday would pay NetSpend …

  Merchants that think by hiring a cloud-based provider to handle their payment card security tasks they’ll never have to worry again about protecting card data had better think twice, according to the PCI Security Standards Council. “Just because people outsource to a cloud service provider, they’re not done,” says …

An effort by a U.S. standards body to gauge interest in a meeting to discuss an open-standard alternative to EMV for chip cards stems primarily from the organization’s concern that EMV’s specifications are not commonly owned by the payments industry, the body’s top executive says. “EMV is a proprietary standard, …

Some of the biggest payments companies and debit card issuers this week reported their latest volumes and related data along with their fourth-quarter financials. • American Express Co. late Thursday reported that U.S. card-billed business grew 7% to $155.5 billion from $145.5 billion in 2011’s last quarter. International volume increased …

  Just when most payments executives had concluded EMV was the only game in town for chip cards in the United States, a financial-services standards committee has issued a proposal for a meeting to examine the case for an open, industry-based alternative. In a letter dated Jan. 20 and obtained …

Citing health reasons, First Data Corp. chief executive Jonathan J. Judge on Friday announced plans to retire. The unexpected retirement casts a cloud of uncertainty over the nation’s largest payment processor as it competes in a fast-changing payments industry and, down the road, prepares for a possible IPO or sale …

The Federal Trade Commission disclosed on Wednesday that it is investigating whether payment card network rules and practices violate the debit card transaction-routing provisions of the Durbin Amendment in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. It’s uncertain, however, whether the investigation goes beyond what Visa Inc. said the FTC requested of it in …

In the wake of its path-breaking partnership with PayPal Inc., Discover Financial Services is ready to do more deals with other companies that will add transaction volume or build its acceptance footprint, chief executive David Nelms indicated on Thursday. Nelms also told stock analysts that growth in the Discover-owned Pulse …