With rising transaction costs leading many retailers to look at the automated clearing house as a less expensive form of electronic payment, at least one leading bank executive is publicly throwing cold water on the concept of proprietary retail debit cards based on the ACH. Jonathan Wilk, senior vice president …

PayPal may be getting close to processing payments for online song downloads, but it's not likely to be moving more broadly into micropayments any time soon. The San Jose, Calif.-based payment-processing unit of online auctioneer eBay Inc. finished adding functionality to its system last month to handle song payments and …

A payment system based on toll-road transponders in Dallas will expand later this year beyond the five McDonald's restaurants that have been part of the radio-frequency identification (RFID) pilot since its inception two years ago. Hummelstown, Pa.-based TransCore, which installs RFID-based toll-road systems around the world, says it will add …

Digency Inc. is within a month of signing its first clients for tests of a new system it has developed that fights e-commerce fraud by pinpointing Web users' geographic location, according to Ed R. Starrs, chief executive of the El Dorado Hills, Calif.-based e-commerce processor. Dubbed “Geocate,” the product has …

Nashville-based card payments processor iPayment Inc. reported financial results today that included a more than doubling in charge volume processed as well as hefty increases in revenue and net income. The company, which closed at the end of 2003 on a $55 million cash acquisition from First Data Corp. that …

Debitman Card Inc., a retailer-sponsored debit card network based in Chico, Calif., is moving aggressively on a new card-issuance plan that calls for increasing the base of Debitman-branded cards to just over 900,000 cards issued by 1,000 merchant outlets by the end of the year. The card base currently stands …

Peppercoin Inc., a micropayments processor in Waltham, Mass., sees a potential market for transactions of small and very small values reaching into the trillions of dollars, embracing both the online and point-of-sale markets. To tap that potential, the new company is moving toward a rollout, planned for mid-summer, of a …

Bankers in the U.S. who bemoan the absence of a business case for smart cards may soon find one now that a massive rollout of chip-based credit and debit cards secured with personal identification numbers is well under way in the U.K., a British banker warned today. That's because fraudsters …

American Express Co. this Friday will begin adding more merchants in lower Manhattan in its test of radio-wave technology for payment transactions. Over the next several weeks, three quick-service restaurants near the card company's headquarters will begin accepting the card company's experimental ExpressPay RIFD keyfobs, which communicate with conventional card …

Nova Information Systems, an Atlanta-based transaction processor, announced today it has agreed to acquire a portfolio of 10,000 merchants from Union Bank of California in a deal expected to close by June 30. Pricing and other terms were not disclosed. Nova says the acquisition is expected to add $3 billion …