Internet merchants looking to cut their acceptance costs may have more control over this expense than they believe, according to Jon Kuhlmann, managing partner at Grapevinehill Inc., a Danvers, Mass.-based online seller of footwear with $13 million in annual sales. Though all merchants have complained increasingly about the cost of …

The other shoe dropped on bank card interchange Thursday afternoon when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., introduced a companion bill to the Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008 pending in the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee. Durbin's bill, including its name, is nearly identical to the House version introduced …

Riding the swelling wave of issuer interest in contactless payment cards, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp this week launched a program to issue Visa Inc.'s payWave contactless cards on debit accounts in California, Colorado, Missouri, and Utah. The bank didn't say how many cards it plans to issue. Customers who already have …

South Bend, Ind.-based 1st Source Bank is reissuing its entire portfolio of debit cards after a hacker or hackers broke into a bank server containing debit card data. No fraud has been discovered as a result of the intrusion, a bank executive tells Digital Transactions News. The $4.5-billion-asset bank with …

Six specialty types of vendors, processors, and other service providers that card issuers use lack specific guidelines on how to protect cardholder data under the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, according to a recent report from research firm TowerGroup Inc. These service providers thus represent “hot spots” that …

A bipartisan letter last week from four U.S. senators to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. demanding information about how they set interchange rates is ratcheting up the pressure on the card networks, and it could represent another step on the U.S. road to joining about 20 other countries that either …

Various issues with payment methods loom large among reasons consumers give for abandoning the checkout process on e-commerce sites, according to a survey released on Wednesday by PayPal Inc. Some 22% of 355 consumers who had abandoned shopping carts at a mix of large and small merchant sites before completing …

Visa Inc. is extending to PIN debit cards a process for reporting and recovering fraud losses from data breaches. In effect for credit cards and the Visa check cards since October 2006, the process, dubbed Account Data Compromise Recovery, will apply to Visa's Interlink point-of-sale debit and Plus ATM networks …

It's official: JPMorgan Chase & Co. and First Data Corp. will end their joint venture that owns Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC, the world's largest merchant acquirer, by the end of the year. The announcement on Tuesday morning was widely anticipated following the buyout of First Data last year by private-equity …

The federal government took in $27.1 billion in payments through credit cards in fiscal 2007 and paid at least $433 million in merchant discount fees, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Agencies that were able to break out their interchange costs …