The recently disclosed data breaches at Target Corp. and Neiman Marcus Group have breathed new life into an industry dispute over how to account for network choice in routing EMV debit transactions. The ATM Industry Association on Tuesday issued a statement critical of MasterCard Inc. for earlier this month declaring …
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Amid EMV Travails, X9 Convenes a Meeting to Investigate Standards for Debit Routing
Against a backdrop of knotty problems besetting the U.S. introduction of EMV, a financial-services standards body is investigating the potential for a set of non-proprietary chip card rules for EMV debit routing. n The group also broke up into subgroups during the meeting, which was held Dec. 9-10 at the …
Read More »Experts Differ on Whether EMV Chip Cards Provide Data-Breach Immunity
The huge data breach at Target Corp. and now one at upscale department store Neiman Marcus Group and possibly other retailers has introduced many Americans to the term “EMV” and the possibility that more secure Europay-MasterCard-Visa chip cards will replace vulnerable magnetic-stripe credit and debit cards in the United States. …
Read More »PayPal Tests ‘In-Context Checkout’ To Let Users Pay While Staying on Merchant Site
In a bid to streamline its payment process for online retailers, PayPal Inc. is testing a service that lets users pay and check out without leaving the merchant’s site. Dubbed “in-context checkout,” the service, which is designed to work on tablets and mobile phones as well as laptops and desktops, …
Read More »Rapidly Expanding Online Merchant Base Could Give Shopify an Edge in Mobile Battle
Shopify Inc.’s recent move to offer its merchants a mobile point-of-sale application marks yet another entry in a market that has filled up fast with competitors ranging from PayPal Inc. to Square Inc. and dozens in between. “You would think we’d reached everybody [with mobile POS products], but we haven’t,” …
Read More »Eye on Transit: A New Fare System for D.C.; New York Ponders a MetroCard Successor
America’s mass-transit systems in early 2014 are continuing their migration away from proprietary fare systems and toward so-called open-fare systems that can accept general-purpose payment cards as well as mobile payments. This week, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, locally known as Metro, awarded a $184 million, 8-year contract to …
Read More »Online Game Provider Zynga Looks to Diversify Its Payment Options With a Bitcoin Test
The Bitcoin virtual currency continued its march toward the payments mainstream with the recent announcement by online game developer Zynga Inc. that it would test Bitcoin acceptance with some of its popular games. n “In response to Bitcoin’s rise in popularity around the world, Zynga, with help from BitPay, is …
Read More »The Gimlet Eye: The Next 10 Years
Something in the human psyche finds comfort in dividing the passage of time into discrete 10-year segments. Decades have a reassuring heft about them, without seeming to overwhelm, as do, say, centuries. Maybe that’s why it seemed fitting to us to celebrate, with this issue, our 10th year of publishing …
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For Retailers, An Unsettling Settlement Retailers and their trade groups opposed to a $5.7 billion settlement of a class-action antitrust case challenging credit card interchange are not going gentle into that good night now that U.S. District Judge John Gleeson has approved the controversial deal. Defendants in the 8-year-old litigation, …
Read More »Target Confirms Encrypted PINs Stolen As Part of Breach, Says Debit Accounts Remain ‘Safe’
Target Corp. on Friday confirmed that data thieves obtained customers’ encrypted debit card PINs, but said the sensitive numbers remain useless to the criminals because of the technology masking them. ”While we previously shared that encrypted data was obtained, this morning through additional forensics work we were able to confirm …
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