With its first top executive in place, an industry consortium formed last year to promote the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) is getting set to elect a board of advisors, launch educational programs for merchants, and conduct a meeting aimed at updating the security rules. The announcements come in …

Rejected by many retailers, the point-of-purchase electronic-check code has one fan that really counts: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart expects the last 300 of its approximately 3,400 U.S. Wal-Mart locations to go live with the automated clearing house payment option next Monday. Wal-Mart's push behind …

Electronic transactions using unique numerical identifiers to mask account and routing data are rising fast, and now the company behind the technology expects it will be commercially available for consumer payments in about a year. The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC says corporate users made 80,459 transactions in 2006 using …

First Data Corp. this week captured big headlines with its $29 billion plan to go private (Digital Transactions News, April 2), but another development at the company could also have a significant long-term impact on the electronic-transactions business. The big processor late last month reported it has licensed patents from …

Barely a day after industry-leading processor First Data Corp. announced that it was going private comes word that the Milwaukee bank-holding company that owns Metavante Corp. is dusting off plans to spin off its fast-growing payments subsidiary. According to The Wall Street Journal, Marshall & Ilsley Corp. is planning a …

Broadening merchant acceptance and negotiating the shoals of merchant pricing will be key parts of Discover Financial Services LLC's strategy to survive and grow once parent company Morgan Stanley spins off the No. 4 payments network. Morgan Stanley, a New York City-based investment bank, late on Friday filed a document …

A survey released this week by a major trade association for corporate treasury officials raises an alarm about fraud in check and electronic payments and points to vulnerabilities in newer transaction channels, such as the Internet. “Payments fraud last year was pervasive and increasing,” says a report from the Association …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 10 Years and years of finger-crossing while pushing ever-more unprotected financial account data across an expanding array of vulnerable origination points and networks have come to a sudden and long overdue demise. When and how the electronic payments industry finally gets serious …

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 …

Some 16% of community banks offer remote deposit capture of checks to business customers, and nearly one-third of these say they have adopted the electronic check technology as “an essential survival strategy,” according to a survey released on Monday by the American Bankers Association. At the same time, 65% of …