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Boosted by its big new merchant alliance with Bank of America Corp., First Data Corp.’s transaction count surged 41% in the second quarter, the leading payment processor reported Tuesday. Factoring out the BofA alliance, First Data’s transaction volume from existing merchants grew a much less spectacular but still respectable 9%, …
Read More »NACHA Mulls Recurring TEL Debits, Other E-Check Changes
NACHA, governing body of the automated clearing house, is considering rules changes that could add volume to the ACH. Among them: allowing recurring payments under the TEL code for telephone-authorized electronic-check conversions; raising the dollar limit to $50,000 for three major e-check codes, and eliminating opt-out notification requirements on two …
Read More »Study: About One-Fifth of Breached Entities Were PCI-Compliant
Supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. Inc. stunned the electronic-payments world when it revealed that it had passed its most recent audit for compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) before hackers breached its computer systems and compromised more than 4 million card numbers (Digital Transactions News, March 18, 2008). …
Read More »Portfolio Defections Hurt Quarterly Debit Results for MasterCard
The profits rolled in for MasterCard Inc. in the second quarter despite a lackluster performance by the No. 2 payment card network’s U.S. operations. Several portfolio losses hurt MasterCard’s debit results in both the United States and the United Kingdom, though top executives said at a Tuesday morning conference call …
Read More »The Emerging Case for a Rules Change to Force Same-Day ACH
With the Federal Reserve set to begin offering on Monday same-day clearing of automated clearing house transactions (Digital Transactions News, July 13), some industry observers are starting to push for a rules change that would mandate banks’ participation in this or a like service. “We either need a core [of …
Read More »Some NFC Consensus Emerges, Thanks to Fed Mediation
Executives with a number of the leading players in telecommunications and electronic payments have managed to reach a consensus on at least some of the issues that have divided them for years over the shape and direction of mobile payments in the U.S. While participants say they are not yet …
Read More »PayPal Sees Transaction Growth Level off in the Latest Quarter
The nation’s sluggish recovery from a long and deep recession kept second-quarter transaction volume static for e-commerce processor PayPal Inc., according to statistics released this week by PayPal’s parent company, online auctioneer eBay Inc. While PayPal added nearly 3 million active accounts in the period to reach 87.2 million, the …
Read More »A Social Media Paradox: Sites Are Popular, But Users Aren’t Happy
While social media sites are wildly popular with consumers, it turns out those same users give the sites low scores for satisfaction, ranking the category above only airlines and cable and satellite TV providers, according to a report released on Tuesday. Still, that dissatisfaction is unlikely to affect payments processors …
Read More »NRF And Visa, Often at Odds, Come Together on Storage Rules
Not always the best of friends, the National Retail Federation and Visa Inc. saw fit on Wednesday to jointly announce that Visa had clarified its card-number storage rules to affirm that merchants may present a truncated or disguised number on a transaction receipt for dispute resolution in place of a …
Read More »Government Benefits Will Help Drive Open-Loop Prepaid Growth
Driven by growth in government programs, corporate payroll cards, and health care, the network-branded prepaid card sector can expect its U.S. load volume to nearly quadruple from an estimated $120.2 billion last year to more than $440 billion in 2017, according to research commissioned by MasterCard Inc. The study, by …
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