A Washington, D.C.-based organization formed early this year by retail-industry trade groups says it is beginning to work out a plan of attack that it hopes will lead to regulation of the fees card-accepting merchants pay issuing banks. After years of friction between banks and merchants over the subject, this …

A proposed method by which retailers could take checks they accept at the point of sale and convert them in a back office into electronic transactions on the automated clearing house could hinder an encouraging trend among consumers away from writing checks and toward electronic transaction channels, such as credit …

With online merchants facing a June 30 deadline to prove they comply with a unified card-industry standard for data security, CyberSource Corp. said today it is rolling out a new service that will help Web-based retailers meet the security requirements. The Mountain View, Calif.-based transaction gateway for Internet merchants says …

The need among online merchants and banks to harden their Web sites against phishing, pharming, and other attacks only rises by the month, and that's helping to drive business for startup companies like The 41st Parameter Inc., Scottsdale, Ariz. The company, formed last year, takes its name from its belief …

NACHA, the Herndon, Va.-based organization that establishes rules for automated clearing house transactions, is working on a business case for a new payment type that would allow merchants to collect all consumer checks they receive and convert them into electronic funds transfers in a back room or other central location. …

DSW Shoe Warehouse's disclosure yesterday that the theft of card data at its stores, originally revealed last month, affected some 1.4 million accounts follows by a week the news that card data stored by New York-based merchant Polo Ralph Lauren had been compromised and casts the spotlight on an industry-backed …

Sensing a trend within banks toward pulling together credit, debit, checking, and other electronic payments-processing operations, IBM Corp. is getting ready to push an all-purpose retail payments engine for both bank back offices and third-party transaction processors. “It's a payments hub, and it's cheaper, faster, and easier to maintain,” than …

A project undertaken by the nation's largest banks to trade digital check images and substitute checks is trafficking 60,000 image files per night eight months after the first two banks hooked up to the network. SVPCO, a unit of The Clearing House, a New York-based payments processor, says volume has …

An operational test of a system by which consumers could instruct their banks to pay online merchants and billers is set to take place in July, according to NACHA, the Herndon, Va.-based rule-setting association for the automated clearing house that is sponsoring the test. Participants so far include Radio Shack …

The process of converting paper checks consumers send to billers into electronic transactions is driving much of the growth of the automated clearing house, according to ACH statistics for 2004 released today. Accounts-receivable conversion, or ARC, transactions increased by more than 1 billion last year, accounting for 54% of the …