The Accel/Exchange electronic funds transfer network, which on Nov. 9 became the first EFT network to roll out online PIN debit to consumers, is pleased with results so far and has plans to begin a major recruitment drive to sign up merchant acquirers for the program next year, says Michael …

Consumers have cut back their usage of credit cards in the past year, often on their own volition but also because suddenly risk-averse credit card issuers have closed millions of credit card accounts or reduced credit lines in their attempts to strengthen recession-racked balance sheets. Now the emerging question is …

VeriFone Holdings Inc. swung to a welcome $3.69 million profit in its fourth fiscal 2009 quarter and sees evidence of recovery in its global markets, but the leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal provider isn't expecting a rebound in its North American business for a while. “It's still kind of a shaky …

A plan by the Federal Reserve to speed up certain automated clearing house transactions so they will clear on the same day they are initiated is “attracting interest” from financial institutions that use the Fed to handle their ACH traffic, says Richard Oliver, an executive vice president at the Federal …

Christmas cheer for merchants and transaction processors came a little early this week with the news that both transaction volumes and dollar sales from cards for at least one major processor are finally trending up, yielding a scant but welcome uptick in average tickets. Even more encouraging: the increases came …

With a number of processors and software houses having introduced applications over the past year to let merchants process cards on smart phones, many observers wondered how long it would be before the established point-of-sale terminal vendors entered this market. On Tuesday morning, the answer came with VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s …

Retailers fighting what they say are high payment-card acceptance costs are not letting the heated debates about health care or President Obama's planned troop surge in Afghanistan push interchange off the political stage. The NACS?The Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing, next week will launch what it calls Phase 2 …

Secure Vault Payments, an online-payments program that lets consumers pay merchants from their checking accounts via the automated clearing house network, is catching on as a way to pay tuition and other costs at the University of Georgia, which began using the method in July in time for fall-semester tuition …

If hype augurs success, the new Square payments application for mobile merchants is off to a promising start. The product, announced this week by a San Francisco startup called Square Inc., is attracting attention not just in the payments business but in the wider business community. That's because Square's founder …

A comparison-shopping application that works on mobile phones will soon tie into PayPal Inc.'s payment platform, blurring the distinction between online commerce and brick-and-mortar retailing and setting the stage for potentially big transaction volumes. Alexander Muse, co-founder of Dallas-based Big in Japan Inc., says he expects his company's ShopSavvy app …