Recent cases of card-data theft from retailers?and the publicity surrounding them?are apparently generating opportunity for startup security-software companies. “More and more retailers are looking for ways to prevent breaches,” says Mark Buczynski, vice president of marketing at BitArmor Systems Inc., a 4-year-old, Pittsburgh-based company that markets encryption software it has …

A letter from a major Hypercom Corp. investor to the point-of-sale terminal maker's chief executive advising a stock buyback and referring to a possible sale of the company, made public Friday in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing, has prompted rival VeriFone Holdings Inc. to target Hypercom customers with an …

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 …

Pay By Touch Inc., the San Francisco company best known for its biometric authentication system for point-of-sale transactions, this week saw its merchant-processing unit take a step calculated to extend its reach into new merchant markets and attract more independent sales organizations to resell its services. Under this week's agreement, …

10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 9 The very existence of 17,000 financial institutions in this country defies most conventional economic logic, which says efficient markets usually consolidate and concentrate around the biggest and best participants. But in the payments realm, bigger is not always better. That's why …

A new point-of-sale payment option that converts checks to electronic debits, available starting next month, will open the retailer market for remote deposit capture, a leading payments executive says. The new option, called back-office conversion (BOC), allows merchants to scan consumer checks in bulk and process them through the automated …

The race to bring online banking and bill-payment services to users' handsets is getting more intense. Most recently, Chantilly, Va.-based Online Resources Corp. said it is entering mobile banking by partnering with Access Softek Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based developer of financial services software. The application uses Access Softek's OFX (open …

Payment-terminal manufacturer Hypercom Corp. on Thursday announced that it has bought the assets and technology of TPI Software LLC, a move that positions Hypercom to be a major player in the growing personal computer-based point-of-sale payments market. Founded in 2001, TPI Software specializes in applications that integrate payment functions with …

It's early yet, but both daily transactions and average order value have been rising for payments accepted by TigerDirect Inc.'s Web site through online payment system SECURE-eBill, says Marwan Forzley, the chief executive of Ottawa-based MODASolutions, which markets the system to online merchants. TigerDirect, a Miami-based merchant that sells electronics …

Interac, Canada's national electronic-funds transfer network, announced recently it processed more point-of-sale debit card transactions on Dec. 22 and 23 than in any two-day period in its 22-year history. The network handled 31.2 million transactions over the period, 1 million more than the previous two-day record, set in 2005. Unlike …