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 …

Mercantile Bank of Michigan has an answer for observers who want to know why financial institutions are starting to show an interest in person-to-person payments. It comes down to competition for deposits, says John Schulte, senior vice president and chief information officer at the bank, which will introduce a commercial …

Electronic person-to-person payments have been around this entire decade, but they're still largely the domain of specialists such as PayPal Inc. and a host of tech companies. But leading bank processors are getting into the P2P act, and if they're successful they could spur greater usage from the consumer mainstream …

Utility companies looking to convert from paper-based billing to electronic payments are continuing to become payment card acceptors, according to the MasterCard Inc. executive who oversees the network's programs for that merchant sector. “We're very pleased with the movement towards card acceptance across utilities of all sizes,” Steve Carnevale, vice …

It won't be long before more merchants sign on to Amazon.com Inc.'s new Amazon Mobile Payments Service (MPS), according to the man who heads up the mobile-payments venture for the world's largest online retailer. “Reaction's been very positive,” Howard Gefen, director of Amazon Mobile Payments, tells Digital Transactions News. “We …

Amazon.com Inc. added more territory to its steadily expanding payments empire on Monday when it unveiled a mobile version of its payments service for third-party software developers, merchants, and distributors of mobile applications. Dubbed Amazon Mobile Payments Service, the system includes Amazon's so-called “1 Click” checkout service, which enables users …

A payments-industry security group formed earlier this year is going through the rather dry procedures of establishing a charter and electing leaders. But one of its first projects could get pulses beating a little faster: a simulated mass attack on databases containing payment card and demand-deposit account information. The exercise …

Most payments startups focusing on mobile commerce these days are relying on either direct debit or carrier billing to handle funds transfers. But Billing Revolution, a 2-year-old Seattle-based company, is marketing a system that lets consumers buy products on their handsets with a single click, and charge their transactions to …

The rules-setting body of the automated clearing house plans to classify mobile ACH transactions under the existing WEB code rather than create a new code for such payments, at least for the short term. Mobile payments could get their own code some time after 2010. Those ideas are part of …

Google Inc. has apparently fixed a weeks-old problem with its Google Checkout online-payments system that prevented merchants from processing recurring transactions, such as subscription fees. While Google says the little-publicized glitch affected only a small number of merchants, other observers say this and outages experienced by other alternative payment services?such …