Following a year of on-again, off-again speculation about its plans in online payments, Google Inc. launched a transaction service Thursday with at least 92 online merchants of various sizes already signed on, from Ace Hardware, Ritz Camera, and Buy.com to Trendy Togs and FaucetDirect. The new service, called Google Checkout, …

National City Corp., Cleveland, has begun selling a so-called non-personalized version of Visa USA's TravelMoney prepaid card, which replaces traveler's checks. National City, which is the sole major bank issuing either personalized or non-personalized versions of Visa's plastic for travelers, is offering instant issue of the new card, embossed with …

Online search giant Yahoo! Inc. is developing what appears to be a person-to-person payment service and may be weeks away from introducing it, but details of the new service remain unclear. A spokesperson for Yahoo! told Digital Transactions News this week the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company was “not ready to discuss” …

The Utah Transit Authority in November will begin accepting contactless payment tokens in a pilot project that will represent the first use of contactless technology to process bus fares in the U.S. The Salt Lake City-based transit agency in September will begin equipping 41 buses that ferry passengers to local …

Motorola Inc.'s new payment software for mobile phones, called M-Wallet, will begin commercial rollout within three to six months with wireless carriers, the Schaumburg, Ill.-based technology company tells Digital Transactions News. A test of M-Wallet is already in progress, officials say, though they can't give details. The company is in …

Despite some poor fourth-quarter financials, shares of First Data Corp. rose nearly 7% this morning after the big transaction processor announced plans to spin off its fast-growing and biggest subsidiary, Western Union, to First Data shareholders. Denver-based First Data also ended speculation that it might sell its lackluster Card Issuing …

Accelitec Inc., a Seattle-based company that last year launched a contactless-payment system aimed at merchants rather than banks, says it is preparing for expansion this year by smoothing integration with existing merchant networks. The company's PayPilot product is in beta with an unidentified merchant, and officials say they expect to …

An Atlanta test of mobile-phone payments, mobile downloads, and other applications, announced today, is the first major U.S. test of near-field communication (NFC) for functions like contactless payments, but it won't be the last. Mohammad Khan, president and founder of ViVOtech Inc., which is supplying handset-based wallet software and contactless …

In a move that could herald a thrust into the rapidly growing point-of-sale stored-value payments market, PayPal Inc. is processing prepaid accounts behind cafeteria payments for its own employees as well as for those of two other technology companies in Silicon Valley. For the past year, the online-payments processor, a …

The U.S. cash-payment market is enormous, but banks' hopes of penetrating it with so-called contactless technology could falter if high acceptance costs spur merchants to look at alternative electronic payment methods. That's one among a number of findings in a new study released this week on the market for transactions …