Data breaches are running at record levels, according to the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center, a non-profit that tracks cybercrime. ITRC says it recorded 342 data breaches from Jan. 1 through June 24, up 69% from the same period in 2007. But, like the origins and perpetrators of so …

Nearly 4,000 gasoline stations branded by Shell Oil Co. have so far adopted a technical change from Visa USA that allows merchants to cut off delivery of a product on a prepaid card transaction as soon as the funds in the account are exhausted. Shell plans to roll out the …

Data Insecurity Part 2 In a purely physical world, if you lost your wallet, and your Social Security card with it, you had a pretty good idea that something was amiss, and could report the loss and replace the card, if needed. Today, in a relentlessly electronic life, the Social …

Image-exchange networks and the financial institutions that use them to process checks electronically may have to contend with a dwindling supply of checks sooner than they expected. For the time being, the networks are doing a robust business, with the volume of items expected to more than quadruple this year, …

Private-equity financing continued to make itself felt this week in the transaction-processing business, with Blackstone Capital Partners VLP's $7.8 billion bid for Alliance Data Systems Corp. and GTCR Golder Rauner LLC's decision to sell TransFirst LLC to an even bigger investment house, Welsh, Carson, Anderson, & Stowe, for $683 million. …

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 …

With credit and debit cards accounting for nearly 46% of supermarket payments, card-acceptance fees now rank No. 2 behind energy costs among the top concerns of grocery-store executives, the Food Marketing Institute reports in its latest financial review of the grocery industry's financial health. In its 2005-2006 Annual Financial Review …

A Conshohocken, Pa.-based processor has begun marketing a service that allows employees covered by flexible-spending health-care plans to use any payment or loyalty card they have to access benefits. Finpago Inc. announced this week an agreement with health-benefits administrator WageWorks Inc., San Mateo, Calif., to launch its FSAok AnyCard program …

In the Federal Reserve Board's final rule that extends Regulation E provisions to the fast-growing payroll card sector, electronic transaction reporting won out over paper statements, but issuers may take on added risk with a longer time period for dispute resolution, experts say. After a two-year process that involved taking …

The drumbeat of data-breach disclosures continued Friday with the news that information linked to about 65,000 individuals?including credit and debit card data–were exposed when a burglar broke into a locked office in a YMCA facility in Providence, R.I., last week and stole a laptop containing the sensitive member information. According …