The Government Accountability Office's report about interchange came out on Thursday, and every group either for or against the controversial transaction fee has put its own spin on the findings since then. That raises the question of whether Congress will actually take action on three pending interchange bills. Forecasting Congressional …

It often seems impossible to thwart online fraudsters, but e-commerce merchants made headway in the past year, according to CyberSource Corp.'s 11th annual study of e-commerce fraud. For the first time in four years, U.S. and Canadian merchants reported a decline in the average percentage of online revenues lost to …

If merchants on the one side and bank card issuers and payment card networks on the other were looking for endorsements of their opposing positions about interchange, they didn't get them Thursday when the Government Accountability Office issued a long-awaited report about the controversial fee. The GAO, the investigative arm …

Coming off a tough year in 2009, independent sales organizations and other acquirers rank merchant attrition and shrinking margins as their top challenges as they look ahead to next year. Acquirers also rank mobile-related products as their biggest emerging market for next year, while they plan to invest more in …

American Express Co. is acquiring Revolution Money Inc. for $300 million in a move the two companies say will help the travel-and-entertainment card giant move into next-generation electronic payments while providing a major boost for Revolution's nascent Internet-based payments platform. The deal enhances AmEx's position in the alternative-payments niche, but …

Bringing small merchants into compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, is no easy task, according to independent sales organization executives that have started PCI programs for so-called Level 4 merchants. “You call up Billy's Pizza and ask him about his firewall, and he's not going to …

First Data Corp. has begun integrating fraud-screening software from an outside vendor that it will offer on a per-transaction basis to its e-commerce merchants. The move brings the software, called Interceptas, within reach of tens of thousands of small online sellers at a time when online fraud is expected to …

Visa Inc. is paying more attention to a broad category of merchants it dubs Internet direct marketers, according to a Visa security executive who spoke on Thursday to independent sales organization executives. These marketers bear many similarities to the often-suspect sellers of the 1980s and '90s who peddled their wares …

The bare-knuckled fight between leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal manufacturer VeriFone Holdings Inc. and the big merchant acquirer Heartland Payment Systems Inc. keeps on escalating, with four lawsuits in three courts now pending. Both companies continue to crank out press releases, letters from their chief executives, and other public-relations missives that …

In a move that could change the way consumers shop and pay on the Web, a startup called Payvment is marketing a free shopping cart that lets online shoppers accumulate merchandise from a variety of Web sites?including Facebook?and then pay for all of it with a single checkout. “We call …