Trends & Tactics   No Apocalypse Now—Or Later—for Debit As Digital Transactions went to press this month, the ultimate extent and timing of the debit restrictions contained in the Durbin Amendment remained unclear. Final rules had not yet issued from the Federal Reserve, and in mid-March a bill appeared in …

Acquiring Peter Lucas The low margins earned on vending-machine sales have historically worked against card acceptance. But now, with evidence of a sales lift from cards, processors and gateways are pushing into vending harder than ever. It’s a frequent scenario: A family is out for fun at an amusement park. …

The debut on Wednesday of Apple Inc.’s iPad 2 ushers in a thinner, lighter version of a tablet computer that debuted a year ago to considerable fanfare both generally and in the payments business. Like its sister product, the iPhone, the iPad won adoption by some merchants looking for ways …

By Lauri Giesen PayPal, followed by Visa and MasterCard, have thrown open their networks to outside developers, sparking a geyser of payments innovation while slicing R&D costs. Why didn’t they do this a long time ago? You’ve heard of open platforms. Well, now they’re coming to the payments business—and with …

Third-party software applications linked to payment processors’ and networks’ systems are becoming the name of the game for attracting merchants, and No. 1 network Visa Inc. is now a player thanks to upgrades to the Authorize.Net unit of its new CyberSource Corp. subsidiary. The new features on Authorize.Net’s Developer Center …

Visa Inc. raised its profile in the growing transit payments market on Tuesday with announcements that it was backing mobile payments for New York City-area commuters and was the exclusive card network for new prepaid fare cards in Los Angeles. Visa also said its payWave contactless card became usable Aug. …

The PCI Security Standards Council on Wednesday released updated guidelines governing PIN-entry devices that incorporate all the rules into a single set of requirements. Previously, there were three separate sets of requirements for point-of-sale PIN entry devices (PED), encrypting PIN pads (EPP), and unattended payment terminals (UPT). Version 3.0 of …

U.S. card issuers are starting to worry about problems some of their high-spending and corporate card customers are having using their magnetic-stripe cards in countries that support the chip-and-PIN standard, according to executives who spoke on Tuesday at a smart card conference. Whereas the issue hardly seemed apparent only a …

The biller-direct channel of paperless bill payment is growing faster than the so-called consolidator channel that consists largely of bank and credit-union Web sites, though not by much, a new report from Aite Group LLC says. The report also says average transaction sizes are increasing and that the biller-direct vendor …

Hammered by rising payment-infrastructure costs and a deteriorating economy, billers are starting to push customers harder to receive bills electronically rather than by paper. The rising tide of home foreclosures, indeed, serves as a wakeup call to billers that aren't looking at electronic bill presentment, since it's getting harder to …