Bankrupt Solidus Networks Inc. has sold two of the three major subsidiaries that it identified this winter as non-core assets, Digital Transactions News has learned. Next up is a March 14 auction of the core biometrics payment business of Solidus, which does business as Pay By Touch. On Thursday, a …

A problem the electronic payments industry calls “friendly fraud,” which has long dominated chargebacks for online sellers of digital goods from songs to software, is getting worse for these merchants, according to the top executive of a payments processor specializing in this market. Gene Hoffman, chairman and chief executive of …

Counter-intuitive though it may be, independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers in general are seeing their spreads increase while simultaneously facing margin compression. The reason, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC assessing trends in the acquiring industry: acquirers are generating new revenues from their merchants outside of …

Contactless payment took another step forward in the mass-transit market with the announcement on Thursday by two key New York City-area transportation agencies that they will run a pilot of MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass system next year. The Port Authority will install contactless readers at 40 turnstiles in all 13 of …

Getting financial institutions and telecommunications providers to agree on major issues related to mobile payments is one of the most difficult problems faced by the nascent mobile-payments industry. Nonetheless, some banks want to plant a stake on the mobile-payments turf early, as evidenced by the announcement this week that Citigroup …

Electronic-payment security experts predicted fraudsters would turn their attention to less-guarded telephone-based banking systems as a result of banks' efforts to beef up online-banking security in the wake of federal regulations promulgated in 2005. Now comes a new study about identity fraud, which, while not showing a causal relationship, gives …

PayPal Inc.'s rapidly growing payment volume, coupled with its increasing penetration of markets not related to its mainline eBay Inc. business, led to the e-commerce processor's announcement this week that it had agreed to buy an Israeli technology firm, Fraud Sciences Ltd., for $169 million in cash. PayPal says the …

Much ado is made about stopping phishing scams, database breaches, and related payment card fraud before it actually happens. But what about legitimate transactions that subsequently generate questionable or outright fraudulent chargebacks, leaving the merchant without revenue after having shipped the goods? A New York payments company called Chargeback File …

A test of contactless payment via mobile phones, launched this week in San Francisco, relies on near-field communication (NFC) technology not only to handle transactions but also to manage consumer rewards. It differs from past NFC pilots in the U.S. in another way: It doesn't rely on either the MasterCard …

Newly independent of their founding bank owners, payment card processors Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) and Metavante Technologies Inc. weighed in this week with their fourth-quarter financials. The numbers by and large showed growth after a thicket of one-time spin-off and other expenses is cleared away, but both companies have …