An interchange battle is raging this week in Washington D.C., even though there is no interchange bill pending in Congress. Some merchants, however, hope that will change soon and are pushing their agenda with an advertising campaign that includes a YouTube video and advertising designed to influence new members of …

The Pulse electronic funds transfer network on Monday announced it will test transactions in which consumers use PIN debit cards to pay online merchants. The Houston-based network is the third EFT system to agree to run such a pilot using technology from Acculynk Inc., an Atlanta-based software company. The Accel/Exchange …

Visa Inc. has kicked breached merchant acquirers Heartland Payment Systems Inc. and RBS WorldPay Inc. off of its list of processors compliant with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI. That action sent the acquirers to a netherworld known as probation and triggered a debate in the payments industry …

Visa Inc. will quintuple the size of its Visa ReadyLink prepaid card reload network when the big money-transfer firm MoneyGram International Inc. enables its 40,000 U.S. locations to add funds to prepaid cards under a deal Visa announced Tuesday. The MoneyGram locations will make Visa's reload network nearly as big …

The Accel/Exchange electronic funds transfer network has signed up a handful of issuers for an Internet-based PIN debit pilot that processed its first transaction, for $9.49, on Wednesday, according to Michael Kelly, general manager of the Morris Plains, N.J.-based network, a unit of Milwaukee-based bank processor Fiserv Inc. Kelly says …

Lower interchange rates in some cases for online retailers and travel-and-entertainment merchants that accept Visa credit cards and higher bank card authorization fees are set to take effect in the coming months. The good news for merchants is that seven of the 11 Visa consumer credit card interchange rates that …

Discover Financial Services this week unveiled a teen-oriented prepaid card called Current by Discover. Current is the latest entrant in a niche that includes the Visa Buxx and Allow MasterCard, prepaid cards that may have garnered more headlines than users. But Discover says its new card has straightforward pricing and …

Yet another banking industry vendor, NCR Corp., is entering the consumer-capture marketplace. But as the field of providers gets more crowded, financial institutions are struggling to get a decent return on technology that enables consumers to make images of and deposit checks from their homes, according to an industry analyst. …

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday slashed the pricing it imposes on its prepaid Visa card, cutting the activation fee by nearly two-thirds, the reload fee by 35%, and the monthly maintenance charge by 39%. Since it rolled out its MoneyCard in June 2007, Wal-Mart has sold 2 million of the …

A downward-spiraling economy is accelerating what had already been a rapidly developing trend for startups to introduce online payment methods as alternatives to bank cards. Indeed, one such company, Miami-based Mazooma Inc., launched a cash-based commercial service on Tuesday with the premise that consumers are looking for ways to buy …