No category of payment-card-accepting merchants, including health-care providers, is immune from the EMV liability shift coming Oct. 1. Yet, some payments providers specializing in servicing clinics and hospitals say there is a lack of understanding among their clients that goes beyond what acquirers have found in other merchant categories. “Health …

Health-care electronic funds transfers via the automated clearing house network increased by 177% from October 2013, the first full month a new rule intended to spur such payments was in effect, through September 2014, ACH governing body NACHA reported Monday. Herndon, Va.-based NACHA says transaction volume in September was 15.5 …

Low-hanging fruit it's not, but health care still remains one of the biggest untapped markets for electronic payments. A new report from Celent LLC estimates that $11 billion could be saved by automating just part of the health-care payments process. And a new industry group is forming to marshal the …

Retailers have complained the loudest about the cost of complying with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, but comments Tuesday at a health-care payments conference indicate that medical providers also incur considerable expense to secure their card-accepting payment systems. PCI-related costs come to about $100,000 a year for …

Prepaid debit cards linked to tax-advantaged employee flexible-spending accounts (FSAs) for medical expenses have been growing quickly in recent years, but they got a big boost this week when leading retailer Wal-Mart Stores Inc. announced it had implemented technology that will spare the customer from sorting FSA-qualifying items from ineligible …

Holiday sales were robust in November, giving merchants reason to be optimistic about overall spending for the holiday shopping season, according to the National Retail Federation. Total retail sales in November, excluding automobiles and gasoline, rose 0.77% month-over-month on a seasonally adjusted basis, and 4.24% on an unadjusted basis year-over-year,  …

Lyric.ai, a provider of artificial intelligence-based payment accuracy solutions for healthcare payers, has partnered with Codoxo, an AI-based cost-containment platform provider, to improve payment accuracy processes for health-plan payers. Lyric will offer Codoxo’s ClaimPilot, Audit Scope, Payment Scope, Provider Scope, and Fraud Scope applications to its customers via LyricIQ, its …

Health iPASS launched Health iPASS Cloud Payments, a processing service for health-care providers. Fiserv Inc. said it is leveraging its merchant-acceptance and card-issuing technology to ease embedded finance for client financial institutions. Metropolitan Commercial Bank said it will deploy cloud-based technology from Finzly to support payment processing via FedNow, Fedwire, and the automated …

As part of its strategy to automate payouts for health-care and property-and-casualty carriers, Echo Health Inc., a provider of payment technology to insurance carriers, is partnering with KyckGlobal Inc. to enable claimants to receive payments digitally through PayPal, Venmo, push to card through Visa Direct, and the automated clearing house. …

Vanco Payment Solutions Inc., a payments provider specializing in the educational and faith-based sectors, said it acquired SmartcareOS LLC, a software provider for child-care centers. Terms were not announced.Entrust Corp., a provider of technology for identity, payments, and data protection, announced it acquired HyTrust Inc., a vendor of data-encryption, key …