10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 8 From the way alternative-payment options are treated by the big players in the electronic- payments industry, you would think these options carried infectious diseases. Not long ago, a payments executive on the treasury side of a major national retailer lamented that …

With consumer fees rapidly trending downward, expedited bill payment may be turning into more of a service to cement customer relationships than a source of revenue. Indeed, the median fee for the service is now zero, compared to $2.50 in 2005, according to survey research recently completed by Javelin Strategy …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 4 Although the payments business has historically evolved at a glacial pace, the massive shift in consumer payments from physical to electronic forms is moving at light speed by comparison, making debit accounts the preferred means of funding transactions in every conceivable …

Seeking to take some of the complexity out of medical payments and at the same time increase transaction volume, American Express Co. and processor Metavante Corp. have teamed up with insurance giant Cigna Corp. for a planned 2007 rollout of a system they claim will let patients know how much …

With PIN debit fraud losses rising along with consumer usage of PIN debit cards, MasterCard Worldwide announced on Wednesday a system it says will score PIN transactions in real time to assess their risk of fraud. Purchase, N.Y.-based MasterCard says when the service goes live in the first quarter of …

More and more consumers now expect their last-minute bill payments to be credited to their accounts with near instantaneous effect. And, increasingly, billers and processors are meeting that expectation?or at least laying plans to. “The trend is toward real-time [bill payment],” says Dave Fortney, senior vice president for electronic presentment …

Hoping to process a growing volume of bill payments customers make in its 76 stores, Verizon Communications Inc. is installing a new point-of-sale system that when complete will speed up check transactions, offer customers real-time payment posting, and allow the telecommunications giant to archive transaction information from multiple payment forms, …

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 …

The chairman of the board of NACHA, the rules-setting organization for the automated clearing house network, looks for widespread adoption of a new point-of-sale payment application the association approved this week and says the network will try again this year to introduce a controversial fee aimed at controlling risk. Chairman …

So-called expedited bill payments are rapidly growing in volume in the U.S., and are also becoming increasingly electronic as remote-payment channels like the Internet gain transaction share from traditional walk-in channels. That's one conclusion TowerGroup, a Needham, Mass.-based payments-research firm, has come to in two studies released this week. Expedited …