While big oil companies at times have temporarily lowered card-acceptance costs in recent years to help gas stations cope with spikes in the price of oil, Shell Oil Co. today said it would permanently lower the price of card processing as well as speed up settlement times for its jobbers …

Online merchants implementing payment alternatives to bank cards are beginning to report significant results. Since it started to accept PayPal in November, for example, online closeout retailer Overstock.com Inc. has seen the alternative payment method soar to 10% of its revenues and 12% of its orders, according to Alan Johnson, …

Jane Thompson, the head of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Financial Services unit, revealed some interesting tidbits on Tuesday about the No. 1 retailer's payment services, but she didn't answer one question many in her audience of 2,200 was asking regarding the widely watched Wal-Mart MoneyCard: how many of the prepaid cards …

Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …

Contactless payment took another step forward in the mass-transit market with the announcement on Thursday by two key New York City-area transportation agencies that they will run a pilot of MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass system next year. The Port Authority will install contactless readers at 40 turnstiles in all 13 of …

With its announcement on Thursday that it is working with a U.K. provider to enable mobile access to credit card accounts in the U.S., Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has joined rival payments processors First Data Corp. and Metavante Corp. in entering the nascent but highly promising business of mobile …

Electronic-payment security experts predicted fraudsters would turn their attention to less-guarded telephone-based banking systems as a result of banks' efforts to beef up online-banking security in the wake of federal regulations promulgated in 2005. Now comes a new study about identity fraud, which, while not showing a causal relationship, gives …

Merchants like to gripe about the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) nearly as much as they like to complain about interchange, but a new set of questionnaires for merchants to use with their PCI assessments could reduce the irritation factor. The new, so-called Self Assessment Questionnaire from the PCI …

A test of contactless payment via mobile phones, launched this week in San Francisco, relies on near-field communication (NFC) technology not only to handle transactions but also to manage consumer rewards. It differs from past NFC pilots in the U.S. in another way: It doesn't rely on either the MasterCard …

Kiosk-based electronic bill payments got another boost this week when processor Fiserv Inc.'s CheckFreePay walk-in bill-pay unit announced a deal with Ready Credit Corp. that will make bill-pay services available to consumers using cash at Ready Credit's 55 ReadyStation self-service kiosks by early spring. The kiosks, which already allow consumers …