Like metastatic cancer, the cyberattacks originating from ordinary hackers all the way up to national governments seem to be getting worse by the day, according to security experts who spoke Wednesday to a conference of e-commerce executives. Case in point: last week, citizens of South Korea couldn’t use banks …

  Dogged by seemingly unrelenting bad news that now includes possible violations of U.S. sanctions against Iran, leading point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Systems Inc. late Monday said its long-time chief executive officer Douglas G. Bergeron “is stepping down,” effective today. The company named its chairman, Richard McGinn, as interim chief …

  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 …

MasterCard is up, and Visa’s Interlink is down—way down—as the U.S. debit industry realigns six months after the Durbin routing rules took effect. Other PIN-debit networks? It’s a mixed bag. But this card game is far from finished. By Jim Daly Think of countless Westerns where the bad guys storm …

Karen Epper Hoffman Economic crises notwithstanding, U.S. payments companies are finding growth potential in Europe, South America, and Asia in traditional services and new niche offerings alike. Despite the seemingly constant stream of bad news about the potential collapse of the euro, economic crises throughout most of Europe, and faltering …

It’s an obscure transaction code that even many payments people haven’t heard of. But POS, the code established by the automated clearing house network for debit card payments, is surging as major merchants adopt the payment method and offer significant rewards to customers who use it. The POS code, which …

Gideon Samid • Gideon@AGSgo.com A timely article in the May issue of this magazine, “Why Payments Startups Fail,” points out that the hurdle of critical mass has doomed many novel payment systems. The article argues that critical mass is necessary for success, but the downside is that it can lead …

Linda Punch When data breaches happen, fingers often point instinctively to shadowy hackers in distant lands. But the real culprits often are inside the office. Security experts say preventative measures must include better screening and monitoring of employees. When data breaches hit the headlines, the instigators typically are portrayed as …

Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments You’ll need a fair amount of memory on your hard drive to keep track of all the comings and goings in the bubbling world of alternative payments. By now, our Field Guide to Alternative Payments needs no introduction. It’s one of our most popular …

A Look at Durbin’s Early Impact Things went pretty much according to script in the first three months of Durbin Amendment debit card price controls. Debit market leader Visa Inc. got dented while MasterCard Inc. picked up speed. Visa chairman and chief executive Joseph Saunders predicted that the slowdown Visa’s …