Speaking to an audience of merchant processors, acquirers, and independent sales organizations, Visa USA's president and chief executive today promised the giant bank card network will become more open to non-issuers and responsive to their concerns, including matters related to operating regulations and data security. Appointed only nine months ago …

A year after it acquired the 50% interest in Vital Processing Services that it didn't already own, Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has renamed the merchant-acquiring processor TSYS Acquiring Solutions and announced several new product lines. The Columbus, Ga.-based company, which is known primarily as a processor for card-issuing banks, …

The number of consumers who use biller Web sites to pay their bills continues to outpace the number who use bank sites, but the latter users are more active transactors, according to recent survey and online-tracking research from comScore Networks Inc. Overall, the online bill-pay market grew 36% in 2005, …

Visa USA's announcement this week of a new program to foster card transactions in the growing category of small-value payments would seem at first blush to be the bank card network's answer to some observers' long-held contention that the card associations should create incentives for the emerging technology of contactless …

The chief executive of the company holding the largest market share of installed readers for contactless payments predicts the technology, assisted by near-field communication (NFC) capability, will move rapidly from the physical point of sale to e-commerce. Mohammad Khan, president and founder of ViVOtech Inc., which makes electronic wallets for …

NACHA's long-expected pilot project to test Internet payments to retailers and billers will get under way early next year and will run for 12 months, the Herndon, Va.-based organization said Monday. In a conference call it held to explain the new automated clearing house payment application and discuss the rationale …

Boulder, Colo.-based Combined Payments Inc.'s FastLane, a new network that converts driver's licenses into loyalty and payment cards, Thursday announced that it had secured its first advertiser as part of a point-of-sale program that will share revenues with participating merchants. The $2 million deal involves the La Jolla, Calif., office …

The phishing trend, which took an ominous turn upward in the closing days of 2005, has grown even more menacing, with both the number of phishing-related e-mails and the number of Web sites hosting phishing attacks increasing by double-digit percentages in January, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing …

It's one of the major products to emerge from the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check 21) signed into law in 2003, but remote deposit capture still has yet to make major headway despite getting some major bank backers and its promise of reducing the amount of paper …

More than a month after officially unveiling its much-anticipated entry into the signature-debit card market, details of Discover Financial Services Inc.'s debit card strategy remain sketchy. Discover's sales pitch to financial institutions to issue its debit cards is built around its ability to offer issuers an interchange rate that is …