There are 25 million people in the U.S. who have a regular income but don't have a bank account, says Vero Financial Group, Lake Oswego, Ore., and now the 2-year-old company has developed a card-based, biometric system to cash checks for this market that cuts transaction time and cost while …

American Express Co. Inc.'s decision to include eight banks as defendants in the lawsuit it filed earlier this week against Visa USA Inc. and MasterCard International Inc. may be a power play to weaken the bank card networks by widening policy differences between the networks and their major members, some …

Visa's decision to increase its interchange rates for PIN debit transactions on its Interlink network may generate more revenue for the network's issuers but will also create more interest in competing non-bank networks catering to merchants, according to some observers. Visa yesterday released a four-page document to member banks outlining …

MasterCard International announced today it will launch pilots of its PayPass electronic payment system on mobile phones from Motorola Inc. The Purchase, N.Y.-based card company says the pilots will get under way at a “variety” of unspecified locations in the U.S by the end of the year. The Motorola phones …

A veteran ATM network executive thinks he can succeed at building a national health-care transaction-processing system, though similar efforts have a dismal record of failure. The executive, Joseph E. Wolfson, founder of the Metroteller electronic funds transfer network, expects the HealthTransaction Network to begin processing transactions from health-care insurance companies …

Albertson's Inc., a Boise, Idaho-based chain of supermarkets, will install and test a biometric-based system to authenticate electronic transactions by the end of the first quarter next year. The system, which relies on mathematically derived templates of consumers' fingerprints, comes from San Francisco-based Pay By Touch, which has been aggressively …

Livewire International Inc., a York, Pa.-based software company with about 100 kiosks and other devices on its network selling items like ski-lift tickets, has teamed up with at least one ATM manufacturer and plans to make agreements with several more to sell tickets through ATMs in supermarkets and convenience stores. …

Dexit Inc., a Toronto-based processor of stored-value transactions using radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, is expanding nationally in Canada and will begin processing transactions in other parts of the world next year?but not in the U.S. any time soon. Dexit, which allows consumers to use chip-embedded keychain “tags” to tap accounts …

A Hampton, Ga.-based processor that has tried for four years to bring to market a system to enable on the Internet debit card transactions linked to personal identification numbers may be close to signing an additional network for access to PIN debit accounts. Kryptosima, a unit of InstaPay Systems Inc., …

Canada's five major banks next spring will roll out a service that will allow consumers to pay for goods and services on the Internet with debit cards linked to personal identification numbers. The service, called iDebit, has been at least 18 months in the making and is expected to be …