Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Reports of yet another merchant-acquirer data breach are speeding around the Internet, but the card networks have not confirmed them publicly. Nor has any processor been identified. Merchant-acquiring sources, however, tell Digital Transaction News that multiple processors may have been breached in recent months. The non-profit Open Security Foundation, an …
Read More »Search Results for: merchants
Online Spending Sags, But Not As Much as Overall Retail Sales
It's no surprise, but it's still significant: retail electronic-commerce sales declined by more than 5% in the fourth quarter, the U.S. Commerce Department's Census Bureau reported this week. “This is the first-ever quarterly decline year over year,” a Census Bureau spokesperson tells Digital Transactions News. The bureau began tracking e-commerce …
Read More »Visa Agrees to Work with GSMA on Standards for Mobile Payments
In a move that may indicate a thawing of relations between mobile operators on the one hand and banks and card networks on the other, Visa Inc. announced on Wednesday it will work with the London-based GSM Association to develop standards for mobile payments and handset-based money transfers. The first …
Read More »Wal-Mart Slashes Fees on Prepaid MoneyCard As Economy Slumps
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. on Wednesday slashed the pricing it imposes on its prepaid Visa card, cutting the activation fee by nearly two-thirds, the reload fee by 35%, and the monthly maintenance charge by 39%. Since it rolled out its MoneyCard in June 2007, Wal-Mart has sold 2 million of the …
Read More »UATP Keeps Its Eye on Alternative Payments?and Hotels
Universal Air Travel Plan Inc. is still in growth mode despite some weakness in its core corporate travel business, thanks in part to an ongoing alternative online-payments initiative that started in 2005. Now the specialty payment processor is looking to sign hotels as merchants. Processing volumes rose about 20% last …
Read More »Merchant Warehouse Launches a Terminal-Based Rate Cutter
A software program that works with point-of-sale terminals allows small merchants to process card transactions at the lowest available interchange rates and arms them with cost-saving technology that up to now was available only to large retailers, according to the independent sales organization that introduced the technology this week. “Tier …
Read More »Mazooma Launches As Consumers Seek out Alternatives to Credit
A downward-spiraling economy is accelerating what had already been a rapidly developing trend for startups to introduce online payment methods as alternatives to bank cards. Indeed, one such company, Miami-based Mazooma Inc., launched a cash-based commercial service on Tuesday with the premise that consumers are looking for ways to buy …
Read More »More ID Fraud Cases Stem from Data Breaches, Report Says
The good news about identity fraud: dollar losses per incident are going down. The bad news: incidents are up. The bad news for merchants: fraud victims, especially young adults, will punish merchants they associate with ID fraud. And some bad news for the payments industry in general: more ID fraud …
Read More »Amazon Launches Flexible Payments As a Commercial Service
Eighteen months after introducing it to developers as a beta project (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 6, 2007), Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday commercially launched its Flexible Payments Service (FPS) as the latest entry in an increasingly crowded field of alternative-payment engines that includes industry giants PayPal Inc. and Google Inc. The …
Read More »NACHA Group Close to Proposals for Mobile Payments on the ACH
A group that has been investigating possible rules changes for the automated clearing house network to account for mobile payments plans to present its proposals by the end of March, according to a senior executive at NACHA, the organization that regulates the ACH. The Mobile Banking Work Group, a NACHA-sponsored …
Read More »