Defenders of interchange for electronic credit and debit transactions argue merchants are losing sight of the value interchange pays for. The subject of interchange has become hotly contested in the wake of lawsuits by retailers challenging it or aspects of it, and following recent interchange hikes by the bank card …

As transaction processors add services to their basic product, they put increasing pressure on gateway providers to differentiate themselves. One of the most ambitious strategies for differentiation is being pursued by Authorize.net Inc., acquired this spring for $82 million by Lightbridge Inc., a Burlington, Mass.-based provider of billing and fraud-management …

The Internet scam known as phishing continued to grow in June, jumping 19% from May to 1,422 unique attacks, according to The Anti-Phishing Working Group, which tracks the fraud. Attacks have increased at an average monthly rate of 52% since the group began keeping statistics last fall. For the third …

Pamela D.A. Reeve, long-time president and chief executive of Lightbridge Inc., has resigned from the Burlington, Mass.-based company, which this spring acquired Authorize.net, a major transaction gateway for Internet merchants, from Infospace Inc. Lightbridge announced that Robert Donahue, a member of the company's board, would step in as interim president …

Although some issuers and processors have soured on so-called single-use or proxy numbers for secure Internet transactions, Discover Financial Services Inc. has just rolled out an advanced version of its own single-use system and plans very soon to begin a major marketing campaign for it. The most significant feature of …

Mountain View Calif.-based CyberSource Corp., a transaction gateway for Internet merchants, announced today it is offering a credit-based, non-card payment alternative that can be implemented with a minimum of integration hassles. The company says an arrangement with merchant processor Paymentech L.P. will allow CyberSource merchant clients to install I4Commerce Inc.'s …

A trade group that is developing a new transaction-messaging standard based on extensible markup language (XML) for financial transactions says it is now turning its attention to point-of-sale payments. The Interactive Financial Exchange Forum, Falls Church, Va., released earlier this year a version of the Interactive Financial Exchange (IFX) standard …

After emerging in the 1990s as specialists in the business of connecting Internet merchants to acquirers and merchant processors, gateway processors are now wrestling with aggressive competition that will retard their growth relative to other e-commerce players, predicts a recent research report on online commerce. Gateways like CyberSource Corp., Authorize.Net …

Visa U.S.A. reported today that the dollar volume of transactions occurring on its cards on the Internet through the first five months of 2004 is running ahead of the gain seen in calendar 2003. Through May 31, Visa's e-commerce volume on credit and debit cards jumped 59% over the year-ago …

The national network for the automated clearing house system is sifting through comments on a new rule that would levy fines on banks that fail to reduce return rates to below 1% for all client originators and for all categories of ACH transactions. Within a week or so, says the …