Visa Inc. is extending to PIN debit cards a process for reporting and recovering fraud losses from data breaches. In effect for credit cards and the Visa check cards since October 2006, the process, dubbed Account Data Compromise Recovery, will apply to Visa's Interlink point-of-sale debit and Plus ATM networks …

The federal government took in $27.1 billion in payments through credit cards in fiscal 2007 and paid at least $433 million in merchant discount fees, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Agencies that were able to break out their interchange costs …

The rules for protecting cardholder data will be updated in October, the PCI Security Standards Council announced on Wednesday. The PCI Council, the organization the payment card networks set up in 2006 to oversee the so-called Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI DSS, is billing the coming changes more …

NACHA's online-payments pilot went live March 31 with one bank and one merchant and expects to have three to five more financial institutions, three to five more merchants, and between three and five billers participating by the end of the year, an official with the Herndon, Va.-based organization says. “The …

Google Checkout, the payment service of Internet search leader Google Inc., continues to add merchants and charge volume, according to a Google executive. But Google remains guarded about revealing exactly how Checkout is faring with merchants, especially after the reintroduction of acceptance pricing in February marked the end of more …

Debit is where the transaction growth is, and now MasterCard Inc. is positioning itself at the center of the action with a new debit-processing platform for card issuers that it calls Integrated Processing Solutions. IPS handles everything from ATM and signature- and PIN-based debit card transactions to prepaid cards?and it …

Green, as in save the environment, and green, as in cash, can be two effective appeals financial institutions can use to persuade consumers to pay bills electronically through bank Web sites, though banks should be especially careful about cash incentives, researchers claim. And the security worries consumers express about electronic …

Fraudsters obtained payment card data originating with Hannaford Bros. Co. while the regional supermarket chain was compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI. The disclosure may mark the first publicly known breach of a PCI-compliant merchant. “We were certified [as PCI-compliant] last spring and we were recertified …

Getting financial institutions and telecommunications providers to agree on major issues related to mobile payments is one of the most difficult problems faced by the nascent mobile-payments industry. Nonetheless, some banks want to plant a stake on the mobile-payments turf early, as evidenced by the announcement this week that Citigroup …

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 …