Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s decision to accept MasterCard Worldwide credit cards?but not credit cards from Visa USA–at its 500-plus Sam's Club stores stems from competitive forces in the warehouse retailing business, but may also signal the beginning of the end of uniformity of merchant acceptance of the two bank card brands. …

Checks cleared as electronic images continue to account for an increasing share of all image-based check traffic, even as an industry group works to hammer out a new system to accelerate the conversion to all-electronic check processing. Indeed, The Image Payments Network, an image-exchange network operated by The Clearing House …

Check processor Solutran Inc. thinks it has found a way to make the new back-office conversion (BOC) e-check code more attractive to merchants: take the costly scanning process out the back office and outsource it. Plymouth, Minn.-based Solutran recently announced its SPIN service, for Solutran POS and Imaging Network. The …

Reporting results for its first full quarter as a publicly held company, MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday released statistics showing significant gains for its U.S. debit card brand. Signature-debit cards accounted for 1.39 billion point-of-sale transactions in the third quarter, a 62% jump over volume in the year-ago period. The product …

With credit and debit cards accounting for nearly 46% of supermarket payments, card-acceptance fees now rank No. 2 behind energy costs among the top concerns of grocery-store executives, the Food Marketing Institute reports in its latest financial review of the grocery industry's financial health. In its 2005-2006 Annual Financial Review …

A banking group that is exploring how to merge electronic image exchange with the automated clearing house network expects to distribute a survey on Tuesday to financial institutions seeking to find out what their plans are for image exchange and what barriers are slowing down their movement toward receiving and …

Bill-payment processor Online Resources Corp. on Thursday reported sharply higher third quarter numbers for transactions, clients, and users as the Chantilly, Va.-based company for the first time included results from rival processor Princeton eCom Corp. Online Resources, which acquired Princeton eCom for $180 million this summer, also said its integration …

Fresh on the heels of a payment-processing initiative and a new branding campaign, the new chief executive of prepaid and fleet card specialist Comdata Corp.'s parent company told investors on Thursday that Comdata is in the acquisitions market. “The Comdata business is posting strong results driven by a proven, effective …

Beyond a recent press release, First Data Corp. hasn't made a huge public splash about its new payment terminal, the FD-100. Yet the terminal is not just a box that processes payment card transactions. It's an element of First Data's multipronged strategy to get more business from small and mid-sized …

The costs of air miles and other perks and rewards account for 44% of bank card interchange, while card issuers' cost of funds and profit margins take 35%, and network branding efforts account for 3%, according to a new report issued this week. Just 13% of the acquirer-paid fee goes …