A growing feeling among independent sales organizations about more eyes looking over their shoulders came through Thursday at the annual conference of the MidWest Acquirers Association, a regional trade group. Jitters over the Federal Trade Commission’s lawsuits against ISOs that processed for allegedly fraudulent telemarketers to increasing worries about data …

PayPal Inc.’s point-of-sale initiative, which has seen the e-commerce processor penetrate thousands of stores while stirring controversy with at least some incumbent processors, will focus on achieving “ubiquity” and solving consumer “pain points” for the next several years, eBay Inc.’s chief executive said on Wednesday. The initiative, which began early …

In an effort to free up cash to rebuild its struggling business, payment processor First Data Corp. will stop funding its 24,000 employees’ retirement plans with cash and instead provide stock grants to all employees. New First Data chief executive Frank Bisignano announced the change Monday in a memo to …

As mobile-payments strategists struggle with clunky checkouts that lead to abandoned sales, a startup based in Albuquerque, N.M., is seeing dramatic early success with a 3-month-old solution that allows consumers to buy products from e-mail messages with a pair of clicks. The company, @Pay LLC, has signed up more than …

Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) on Thursday announced that Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) will do the transaction processing for the nascent mobile-payments network owned by some of the nation’s largest retailers. MCX also said department-store company Kohl’s Corp. and the parent company of the Circle K convenience-store chain are …

Biometric authentication will be in widespread use by financial institutions and online merchants by 2015, a payments-security expert predicts. “We’re at the threshold, it’s going to be common in the next year or so,” Al Pascual, a senior analyst at Javelin Strategy & Research, tells Digital Transactions News. Pascual forecasts …

The Durbin Amendment’s pricing caps are having an impact on small issuers as well as large, and issuers overall are far from bullish about debit-transaction growth, according to a wide-ranging report released on Wednesday. Issuers exempt from the law’s interchange cap report an average income of 45 cents per transaction …

Nearly 90% of U.S. point-of-sale terminals will be ready to accept Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip cards by 2017, according to a new Aite Group LLC study. The report examines the reterminalization of card-acceptance locations triggered by the payment card networks’ plans announced in 2011 and 2012 to wean America off of …

The payments industry may have solved a vexing problem related to EMV chip cards and the Dodd-Frank Act’s Durbin Amendment, but whether that solution will smooth the way for EMV (Europay-MasterCard-Visa) deployment in the United States is less clear. The EMV Migration Forum, an industry group that has been working …

Payments executives already know the coming changeover from magnetic-stripe cards to chip cards using the Europay-Visa-MasterCard (EMV) standard will be expensive—about $11 billion, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC. But Aite notes that while likely to greatly reduce fraud at the point of sale, the big switcheroo …