Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
As PayPal Inc. recovers from a major?and apparently unprecedented?system outage on Monday, questions are starting to emerge about the actual impact on online merchants and about the e-commerce processor's preparedness for such emergencies. PayPal reported late in the day that its network was functioning normally again after the failure of …
Read More »Heartland Hit by Drop in Same-Store Sales, But Encryption Moves Ahead
A record decline in same-store sales and a $19.4 million charge for costs related to its data breach put big merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. into the red during the second quarter. But Heartland executives on Tuesday pointed to bright spots, and also said their post-breach efforts to develop …
Read More »A Startup Builds on Cap One’s Decoupled Debit Program to Run Rewards
A company founded by the man behind Capital One Financial Corp.'s decoupled debit program is introducing what it terms a “next-generation debit rewards” system that allows banks to provide cost-free rewards to cardholders. Under the system developed by Atlanta-based Cardlytics, merchants fund rewards that will be offered to banks' online-banking …
Read More »Lower Spending on Each Transaction Drops Dollar Volume for AmEx
As the economy continues to sputter, U.S. card-billed business at American Express Co. fell 15% to $104.8 billion in the second quarter, from $123.5 billion a year earlier, according to results the travel-and-entertainment giant reported on Thursday. Average U.S. cardholder spending during the quarter on so-called basic card issued directly …
Read More »Microsoft Is Among the First to Try out PayPal’s New Payments API
Microsoft Inc. is among three developers that have integrated PayPal Inc.'s new application programming interfaces into applications as part of a beta program, PayPal announced on Thursday. PayPal formally opened its payment platform to third-party platform developers at a conference for developers. By opening up the platform program?called PayPal X?PayPal …
Read More »PCI Council Releases Guidelines for Wireless Network Security
Nearly a year after ordering the phase-out of Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), a technology introduced in 1999 to protect data flowing over wireless networks, the PCI Security Standards Council this week released new guidelines for enhanced wireless security. The so-called Payment Card Industry data security standard wireless, written by the …
Read More »Security Experts Start to Look at Data Encryption for Smart Phones
As the momentum behind mobile payments gathers strength, some technology experts are starting to consider so-called smart phones?which make mobile payments easy?to be devices in need of encryption. That's one finding in an annual study out Monday about encryption, a hot topic in the payment card industry nowadays because of …
Read More »An Information Gap Sparks a Dust-Up over Remote Key Injection
Is MasterCard Inc. putting the kibosh on a new technology called remote key injection that makes it easier to enhance the security of point-of-sale payment terminals? That's the impression some payments executives got after reading an online Computerworld article Wednesday that said MasterCard was insisting on manual injection of security …
Read More »PayPal Denies Adaptive Payments API Is a Ploy to ‘Crush’ Amazon FPS
PayPal Inc. is planning to launch a flexible-payments application programming interface that will allow merchants and others to build their own payment systems, but the company denies that the Adaptive Payments API is a response to Amazon.com Inc.'s Flexible Payments Service, which has been available as a commercial product for …
Read More »MPX, Payments Central Merge in Latest ACH Consolidation Move
The slow but steady pace of consolidation of regional automated clearing house associations continued this week when Kansas City, Mo.-based Mid-America Payment Exchange (MPX) merged with Columbus, Ohio-based Payments Central. The new entity, dubbed Epcor, serves more than 2,300 financial institutions in all or parts of 12 states stretching from …
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