First came PayPal Inc., then Google Inc.'s Checkout service. Now MODASolutions, an Ottawa-based company that lets consumers pay e-retailers as if they were paying any other online bill, is offering incentives tied to the holiday-shopping season to promote alternative ways to pay online. But in MODASolutions' case, its SECURE-eBill service …

Pay By Touch Inc., which on Monday introduced a new, personal-computer-based authentication service based on fingerprint identification, plans to couple the new service with online payments and loyalty programs some time in the first half of 2007. The new product, called TrueMe, relies on the San Francisco company's technology, along …

Consumers spend up to $1.5 trillion a year using on small purchases using cash, depending on who's estimating, but converting so-called micropayments into electronics will be one of the payment card industry's tougher challenges. Experts contacted by this newsletter's sister publication Digital Transactions magazine for an upcoming story on micropayments …

In a deal on which the two parties spent the weekend hammering out final details, Discover Financial Services LLC and Global Payments Inc. on Monday said Global would take over processing and other acquiring functions on Discover transactions with merchants for which Global processes Visa USA and MasterCard Worldwide transactions. …

Looking to make inroads in the U.S. mobile-commerce market, Valista Ltd. has launched a hosted version of its payments-gateway product and has aimed it squarely at mobile operators hoping to cash in on the trend toward so-called off-deck transactions. The payments-software vendor, based in Dublin, Ireland, and in San Mateo, …

Direct charges to subscribers' bills and credit and debit cards will account for the bulk of mobile payments in five years, with today's preferred method, short-message-service (SMS) payments, dropping to a minority of transactions, a survey released this week indicates. Only 6% of respondents to the survey, attendees at a …

Think of electronic bill payments and, not surprisingly, the Internet usually comes to mind first. But many billers, especially banks, have yet to offer bill payments through telephone-based customer-service systems or automated interactive voice-response units, experts tell Digital Transactions magazine in an upcoming story on expedited bill payments. The Web's …

The share of e-commerce dollars coming from so-called alternative payment methods will grow from 12% in 2005 to 26% in 2009, an electronic-payments expert says. And two such alternatives emerging only now will gain momentum over the coming three years, with PIN debit accounting for about 3% and NACHA's new …

A multi-faceted marketing partnership between giant Internet portal Yahoo! Inc. and PayPal Inc., announced last week, seems likely to drive a significant flow of transaction volume to online auction provider eBay Inc.'s payment service. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! is the No. 2 parent company in terms of visited …

Hoping to take advantage of the related trends in mobile commerce toward so-called off-portal business and direct-to-bill payments, international m-payments processor Valista Ltd. has introduced a new version of its transaction-processing engine, which is aimed primarily at mobile-network operators and Internet Service Providers. The latest release of the engine, called …