In putting together this month’s issue, we were struck, as we are every year, with the changes we found with our Annual Field Guide to Alternative Payments. In just the course of the past 12 months, about half a dozen entries have fallen out of our guide because they no …

The re-terminalization of the merchant point of sale to accept EMV chip cards could generate more than $6 billion in revenues for independent sales organizations and other merchant acquirers, but the changeover is fraught with competitive and operational risks, according to a new research report by Aite Group LLC. Aite …

  What merchants increasingly want from an independent sales organization  is an all-in-one application developer, provider of business solutions,  and bundler of mobile and e-commerce data.  Forward-thinking ISOs are the ones that can tick off those boxes. By Peter Lucas Having difficulty figuring out the definition of an independent sales …

Value-added resellers have turned into very effective—but increasingly expensive—sales engines for merchant processors. When does it make sense to work with them—and just how much of a cut do they take? By Peter Lucas Ten years ago, value-added resellers looking to broaden their reach to merchants were aggressively pursuing relationships …

n A payments executive for Sinclair Oil outlines her frustrations with data security—and argues for a major upgrade to EMV. by Trinette Huber We’ve all been hearing a lot about EMV, or chip card technology, lately as some banks and merchants actually issue chip cards and install the terminals that …

Despite a seemingly non-stop parade of headlines about data breaches last year, the number of credit and debit card records compromised actually fell, according to new figures from the Identity Theft Resource Center. The ITRC says it identified 111 data breaches that exposed 3.38 million records in 2011. n In …

  By Peter Lucas   As check volume dwindles, processors and banks are scrambling to find new ways to leverage the fixed costs of their check-image archives.       It’s no secret that paper-check volume is in steady decline. Thanks to the growing popularity of electronic payments, the number …

  By Steve Mott   Scratch most of the proposed or existing wallets, and you’ll find the same payments infrastructure everyone is trying to move beyond. What’s needed is an alternative that benefits consumers and merchants as much as it does banks, networks, and carriers.       The rising …

  Fear of the damage that a data breach can inflict on a brand, rather than of network fines, drives organizations to invest in compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI), a study released on Tuesday says. Some 69% of the mostly online organizations surveyed cited brand protection …

  Cover Story Mobile-payment schemes proliferate but innovations abound in all corners of the new world of electronic-payment systems competing for consumer and merchant adoption.   By John Stewart, Jim Daly, and Linda Punch       We’re putting on weight. First published in 2009, Digital Transactions’ Field Guide to …