Tuesday's news that Cynergy Data was filing for bankruptcy and planning to sell its assets serves as perhaps an extreme example of the fierce toll the recession is taking on independent sales organizations, observers say. Indeed, some say the ravages of reduced payment volumes, failed merchants, and squeezed margins could …

As an attorney for the merchant plaintiffs predicted earlier this summer, Visa Inc. disclosed Monday that it plans to prepay the remaining $800 million of its settlement obligations with merchants under the so-called Wal-Mart debit card class action for a discounted $682 million. If the plan gets court approval, the …

Alternative-payments processor Moneta Corp. this week announced the addition of three online merchants to its roster of clients and next week will sign a major Internet housewares retailer, says Guido F. Sacchi, chief executive of the Atlanta-based company. In all, some 20 merchants will be signed by month's end, he …

Intuit Inc. has quietly introduced an online-payment product that may be aimed initially at small businesses looking for ways to let other businesses pay them electronically, but could move into consumer payments later on. The new service, called Intuit PaymentNetwork, charges a flat 50 cents per transaction, with no set-up …

As bills paid the old-fashioned way–through the mail–decline while online bill payments boom, a Digital Transactions News analysis of recent automated clearing house data shows Internet-based e-check traffic approaching transaction volumes of check conversions for conventional bill payments. At the current rate, the Web-based payments could surpass these paper-based check …

The merchant-acquiring industry can expect more market consolidation and more attention to security, and it also will have to adjust to the secular shift away from credit and toward debit, according to a new assessment of market trends from Mercator Advisory Group Inc. Portfolio sales and acquisitions of smaller processors …

Kemesa LLC entered the war on online fraud on Monday with a product that allows consumers to pay e-commerce merchants using so-called anonymous data that would be useless to cyber thieves. The Aventura, Fla.-based startup says it plans to market the product to consumers through their financial institutions and is …

As PayPal Inc. recovers from a major?and apparently unprecedented?system outage on Monday, questions are starting to emerge about the actual impact on online merchants and about the e-commerce processor's preparedness for such emergencies. PayPal reported late in the day that its network was functioning normally again after the failure of …

As the recession continues to batter merchants of all sizes, small and medium-size retailers are getting hit especially hard, and as a result so are the acquirers that process their card transactions. Indeed, in a development apparently never seen before, same-store sales on Visa and MasterCard for these Main Street …

Banks face a new threat in electronic payments, according to a report just out from Javelin Strategy and Research: the ability of telecommunications companies to take the driver's seat in mobile person-to-person payments. This risk comes to the fore as the number of so-called smart phones explodes and consumers show …