With help from Discover Financial Services, regional electronic funds transfer networks this week took a major step toward ending a dilemma over how merchants can route PIN-debit transactions made on chip cards through EFT networks and still meet the Durbin Amendment’s transaction-routing requirements. Previously, the main routes available for …

When in 2010 our solons in Congress enacted the Dodd-Frank Act with its Durbin Amendment controlling various aspects of the debit card business, many who opposed this mischievous amendment (including us) did so on principles of free-market economics. We pointed out, for example, that the very merchants who were lobbying …

E-commerce, better malware, and mobile devices are on the minds of fraudsters, according to Trustwave Holdings Inc.’s latest annual data-breach study. Chicago-based Trustwave, a leading data-forensics investigator and security vendor, based its report on 450 data breaches it investigated last year around the world. Hackers targeted payment card data in …

Visa Inc. is teaming up with the hot smart-phone manufacturer Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. to kick-start the market for near-field communication (NFC) payments, and it’s also got a deal with technology provider Roam to develop mobile payments. Under an agreement with South Korea-based Samsung that Visa announced Monday, banks and …

  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 …

  With the United States playing catch-up with Canada and much of Europe in deploying chip card technology, security firms are starting to respond to online operators’ fears that the arrival of chips at the point of sale will drive fraud to the Internet. One of the latest of these …

  Fraudsters are turning their attention to e-commerce sites, continuing to improve the malware they use to find and harvest payment card data, and sensing opportunity in mobile devices, according to the latest annual data-breach report by Trustwave Holdings Inc. Chicago-based Trustwave, a leading data-forensics investigator and security vendor, based …

Despite the nearly universal opinion that near-field communication (NFC) is a high-capacity, fast, and secure technology for mobile payments, it isn’t exactly winning popularity contests. Mobile-payments leaders PayPal Inc., Square Inc., and Starbucks Corp., along with many other industry players, use other technologies, often quick-response (QR) codes or other 2-D …

Peter Lucas The card networks’ gambit to rapidly accelerate EMV terminal rollout by waiving PCI compliance reporting for merchants is falling short. Sometimes what looks to be a great deal is not all it’s cracked up to be. Offers by the payment card networks to accelerate the U.S. deployment of …

Lauri Giesen Will PIN debit for online transactions ever take off? Some backers are hopeful for this year, but others argue the Durbin Amendment and alternative technologies—like mobile payments—could make PIN debit irrelevant for e-commerce.Time was, the case for online retailers to accept debit card transactions secured with a PIN …