Probably no pathway in electronic payments is more littered with the wreckage of failed processors than that of micropayments. But recent moves by publishers to charge for content is helping fuel renewed interest in the business of processing tiny transactions. Google Inc., for example, has developed a micropayments engine to help …

  Why Prepaid Cards Need Marketing TLC Regulation, public ignorance about prepaid cards, and negative publicity worry prepaid card executives, according to a recent survey. Researchers from Boston-based Aite Group LLC polled 24 senior executives during March’s Prepaid Expo USA conference in Orlando, Fla., and asked them to rate their …

  Lauri Giesen   Merchant acquirers and their vendors have always used technology in their long-running war against chargebacks, but today’s weapons and tactics are getting more sophisticated. Knowing when to retreat remains an important way to control costs.   Chargebacks: few words are dreaded more by retailers and merchant …

  Security Peter Lucas While it’s effective against malware like the pesky Zeus Trojan, banks have been slow to adopt out-of-band authentication. Now, with mobile and P2P applications growing, that may soon change. Imagine the following scenario: A cybercrook plants a malware Trojan, infamously known as Zeus, in the Web …

  Components Jane Adler The 40-year-old automated teller machine is hardly thought of as a springboard for innovation. Yet new technology is giving rise to a raft of services that promise to bring renewed purpose to the humble bank machine.   Now 40 years old, the ATM would seem to …

  Cover Story Mobile-payment schemes proliferate but innovations abound in all corners of the new world of electronic-payment systems competing for consumer and merchant adoption.   By John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Linda Punch       We’re putting on weight. First published in 2009, Digital Transactions’ Field Guide to …

When eBay Inc. released its fourth-quarter results back in January, the company’s top executives spent some time during their conference call with analysts discussing the potential effect of the Durbin Amendment on PayPal Inc., eBay’s e-commerce transaction processor. Durbin and its restrictions on debit card pricing and transaction routing remain …

Could a little-noted provision in the Durbin Amendment strangle the nascent U.S. contactless-payments market in its crib? It’s a very real possibility, says a pair of researchers, and the consequences could deal a blow to the prospects for mobile payments that depend on a promising technology called near-field communication (NFC). …

ModaSolutions Corp.’s eBillme bills itself as the cash-based way to pay for online purchases, but the company has put a new twist on its services: electronic gift cards. EBillme this week added a dozen new brands to the approximately 50 merchant brands it was already offering online. “We’d like to …

MasterCard Inc.’s new interchange schedule is out, and it contains no changes in consumer debit card rates or the transaction volume thresholds that many rates require. Normally, no change means no news, but in the highly charged world of interchange, anything the payment card networks do or don’t do is …