By Linda Punch Those looking for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to give Bitcoin legitimacy as a currency when the agency issued its guidance earlier this week were sorely disappointed. The IRS said the digital cash will be taxed like property, not currency. But the quest for legitimacy may be …

  A historical shift in how some federal financial law-enforcement agencies view the payments industry is under way, and it’s not one that bodes well for the industry, Jason Oxman, chief executive of the Electronic Transactions Association, told attendees at the Southeast Acquirers Association conference this week in Atlanta. Dubbed …

Discover Financial Service’s Pulse subsidiary last week became the latest debit network to license Visa Inc.’s so-called common application identifier (AID) on soon-to-be-issued Europay-MasterCard-Visa (EMV) chip debit cards. This latest agreement means Visa’s common AID will be enabled on cards that account for nearly 90% of U.S. PIN-debit transactions. The …

Target Corp. told a U.S. Senate committee Wednesday that the overlap in the number of consumers affected by the two-headed monster of its data breach may be 12 million or more. The nation’s No. 2 general retailer also said it is improving its data security in the wake of the …

In an unsurprising ruling, a three-judge panel on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld the Federal Reserve Board’s controversial rule implementing the Durbin Amendment’s debit card provisions in 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act. A federal district judge last July overturned the rule, saying the Fed hadn’t followed Congress’s intent. Judges …

  Security and convenience-conscious consumers wielding smart phones may one day have a safer and easier way to get cash from ATMs. ATM maker Diebold Inc. is testing a cash-dispensing-only ATM that relies on a mobile wallet to authenticate the consumer, eschewing a PIN pad and card reader. The ATM, …

At a time when both banks and retailers are reeling from a rash of payment-data breaches, a technology company that has developed a system some believe could stop these breeches has announced that it has secured new patent protection for its technology. Mentor, Ohio-based CardinalCommerce Corp. said this week it …

Despite Bitcoin’s recent travails, the fledgling digital currency has begun to win support from some of the nation’s best-known merchants. This week came news that department-store chain Lord & Taylor will start accepting Bitcoin through a mobile app called Pounce. The news followed upbeat Bitcoin results released by online retailing …

Cachet Financial Solutions Inc.’s acquisition of DeviceFidelity’s Moneto prepaid mobile platform will help open new markets for the remote-deposit capture company. n Remote-deposit capture is Cachet’s core business, Larry Blaney, executive vice president of sales, tells Digital Transactions News. But in the past two years client demand for services beyond …

Might decoupled debit rise again? It very well could, according to some payments experts, and the light on the hill is the decoupled debit card issued by the battered and bruised discount retailer Target Corp. For nearly three months, Target has weathered a storm of bad publicity after confirming a …