In an effort related to a broader initiative to tighten risk management in the automated clearing house network, NACHA this week announced its voting membership has approved a rule that requires companies that originate transactions to identify themselves with names their customers will recognize. The new rule, which goes into …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp. on Monday said it is talking with France-based Ingenico about the $332 million buyout offer Ingenico made last week, an offer that came at a time when Phoenix, Ariz.-based Hypercom is trying to buy the POS terminal unit of another French company, Thales S.A. Ingenico …

Visa Inc., which is planning an initial public stock offering this year, processed 9.1 billion transactions in its fiscal 2008 first quarter ended Dec. 31, up 1.1 billion or 13% from 8 billion a year earlier, according to the quarterly report the No. 1 payment network filed Feb. 4 with …

Merchants like to gripe about the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) nearly as much as they like to complain about interchange, but a new set of questionnaires for merchants to use with their PCI assessments could reduce the irritation factor. The new, so-called Self Assessment Questionnaire from the PCI …

In a major vote of confidence for an 11-month-old form of electronic payment, Hy-Vee Inc., a 224-unit supermarket chain based in West Des Moines, Iowa, has installed back-office conversion (BOC) in 21 of its stores in the Des Moines area since last August and plans to roll out the system …

PayPal Inc.'s rapidly growing payment volume, coupled with its increasing penetration of markets not related to its mainline eBay Inc. business, led to the e-commerce processor's announcement this week that it had agreed to buy an Israeli technology firm, Fraud Sciences Ltd., for $169 million in cash. PayPal says the …

Much ado is made about stopping phishing scams, database breaches, and related payment card fraud before it actually happens. But what about legitimate transactions that subsequently generate questionable or outright fraudulent chargebacks, leaving the merchant without revenue after having shipped the goods? A New York payments company called Chargeback File …

A test of contactless payment via mobile phones, launched this week in San Francisco, relies on near-field communication (NFC) technology not only to handle transactions but also to manage consumer rewards. It differs from past NFC pilots in the U.S. in another way: It doesn't rely on either the MasterCard …

While processors continue to struggle with the economics of micropayments, Javien Digital Payment Solutions Inc. may have found a way to make the tricky payments work. The McLean, Va.-based processor, which this week introduced a payments gateway to go along with a payment-processing platform it offers primarily to sellers of …

With its latest pilot for near-field communication (NFC) technology, which was announced on Monday and got under way last Thursday with select U.S. Bancorp credit card holders in Spokane, Wash., MasterCard Worldwide is testing a streamlined version of handset personalization it hopes will make it easier for consumers to adopt …