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Visa reports the holiday shopping season generated a 15.7% increase in dollar volume on its card products compared to the same time last year, with volume reaching $218.7 billion on all Visa-branded cards in the Nov. 1 to Jan. 2 period. Consumer spending on the company's debit cards grew 26.2%, …
Read More »USPTO Will Re-Examine CyberSource’s Patent at ReD’s Request
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has said it will re-examine a patent granted in 2000 to CyberSource Corp. that lies at the heart of a patent-infringement suit the Mountain View, Calif.-based processor filed last August against rival Retail Decisions PLC (ReD) and its U.S. operation, Retail Decisions Inc. …
Read More »Sovereign Re-ups with First Data for Merchant Processing
Sovereign Bank has renewed a merchant-processing contract with First Data Corp., the Denver-based processor has announced. The five-year deal represents an extension of Sovereign Merchant Services, which was established in 2001 as one of a number of alliance agreements First Data has concluded with banks in which FDC provides merchant-transaction …
Read More »UnitedHealth Moves Toward 20 Million Cards for Claims, Payments
UnitedHealth Group is on track to issue as many as 20 million cards that consumers can one day use for a dual purpose: to handle eligibility verification and other point-of-care payment transactions and as a debit card to electronically access funds from a health-savings account. To date UnitedHealth has issued …
Read More »LexisNexis Looks to ID for Transactions As Its Next Step
With the unrelenting rise of phishing attacks, banks and merchants are hunting for new ways to secure the identity of consumers in online transactions. That's creating opportunities for companies like LexisNexis, proprietor of one of the world's largest databases of public-record information. Now the company's RiskWise unit is looking at …
Read More »Viewpointe’s Image on Demand System Goes Live with First Bank Duo
Viewpointe Archive Services LLC became the latest image-exchange venture to go live today when First Horizon and SunTrust Banks became the first banks to clear checks through the service. Earlier this fall, the Small Value Payments Co., New York, began moving check images for client banks, and Endpoint Exchange Inc., …
Read More »Return Rates on ARC Dropping Even As Volume Soars, NACHA Says
Return rates on accounts receivable check conversions are dropping despite the rapid clip at which the volume of these electronic payments is climbing, new data from the National Automated Clearing House indicate. The ARC category of ACH debit, created in March 2002, has gone from 5.3 million transactions in the …
Read More »CyberSource Sees Online Holiday Traffic Peaking Next Tuesday
CyberSource Corp. predicts that the increase in holiday spending online will be about equal with the rise in volume seen during the same time in 2003, disputing the estimates of some observers that e-commerce traffic growth will be lower this year. Growth last year in the fourth quarter was 25% …
Read More »A Startup Says It Can Merge RFID Payment with Biometrics
A startup company says it is probably 12 to 18 months away from piloting a contactless payment card that will incorporate both chip-based radio-frequency identification and biometric authentication technology. Up to now, RFID-based payment pilots and programs have not included PINs or any other means of authenticating users. But 2-year-old …
Read More »VeriFone Pays $13 Million Plus for GO Software to Expand POS Market
Leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Inc. has announced it is buying GO Software from Return On Investment Corp. for $13 million in a deal expected to close next month. With the acquisition, San Jose, Calif.-based VeriFone expands its presence in the market made up of so-called integrated point-of-sale devices, such …
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