Secure Vault Payments, the online payment system that NACHA has been piloting since last spring, is catching on as a bill-payment alternative among colleges and state agencies, says Kendall Myles, the executive who is heading up SVP merchant recruitment for NACHA, the regulatory body for the automated clearing house network. …

At a time of rising business failures and intense industry competition, United Bank Card Inc. says its new Harbortouch unit is producing what the big independent sales organization sought?enhanced merchant relationships and higher margins. In addition to card processing, Harbortouch offers small and mid-sized restaurants and retailers business-management hardware and …

While experts once thought contactless payments via a technology called near-field communication (NFC) would drive mobile payments, the sluggish development of NFC now means handset-based payments will grow without the technology, according to a research report released on Tuesday. Indeed, payments by text messages, through the mobile Web, and on …

The steady march toward more secure payment-processing software is likely to force many?possibly thousands?of small software vendors out of the market of serving merchants and card processors. These vendors will find it too expensive to upgrade their existing point-of-sale and related applications to meet specifications set forth in the new …

The torrent of press releases promoting this new mobile-banking technology or that new mobile-banking service usually references, either implicitly or explicitly, the consumer as the end user. But small businesses represent a far more receptive user group for mobile-banking services, including bill payments, according to a new report from Boston-based …

Financial institutions have made big strides in fighting identity fraud over the past year but still lag in preventing the crime by using such technologies as mobile alerts, according to a report released this week by Javelin Strategy & Research. “Despite so many consumers having mobile devices, banks are still …

As mobile banking spreads to more banks, the companies that enable the service are getting ready to bring it to the merchant point of sale, along with a bevy of incentives to induce consumers to buy. The move, say some, stems from the recognition that if banks simply enroll online-banking …

A startup company called Bling Nation Ltd., which debuted this week, plans to combine contactless-payment technology with an on-us approach to debit transactions that it says will cut transaction costs for both community banks and merchants. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based processor is in discussions with five financial institutions and plans …

Nearly one-third of U.S. Bank customers who have been issued a contactless debit card have performed at least one contactless transaction since the bank's program began in June, an executive with the bank said on Wednesday. “So far, it's looking really promising,” Michael Shepard, group product manager for consumer credit …

Retail sales are slumping and stores are closing, but the online retailing channel?and thereby online payment transaction volumes?will come through relatively unscathed, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy and Research. Javelin's latest online retail payments forecast predicts Internet retail purchases will total $148 billion this year, up 10.4% …