A new service debuted on Monday in Canada for which there is no equivalent in the U.S.: a single mobile person-to-person payments offering from the nation's three major wireless telecommunications companies. The service, called Zoompass, also is linked to a prepaid MasterCard PayPass contactless card that gives it utility at …

Security issues weigh more heavily on the minds of executives with merchant acquirers and independent sales organizations than they do among any other payment card industry sector, according to new research from Aite Group LLC. Some 43% of acquiring executives rated data security, including compliance with the Payment Card Industry …

They're mad as hell, but whether they're going to take it any more isn't quite as clear. That's the essence of a letter seven merchant trade groups sent Tuesday to the PCI Security Standards Council and the five general-purpose payment card networks. The merchants want more input when the Payment …

The Credit Card Fair Fee Act, a bill that would inject government into the interchange-setting process, has been resurrected after dying in committee last year. But this time there are more players around the table seemingly less inclined to sympathize with the defenders of the current bank card interchange system. …

Malicious software has been discovered on some Eastern European ATMs that has dangerous new powers to extract money as well as card data, according to a security executive. Meanwhile, Sony Corp. of America has confirmed that someone illicitly copied more than 5,000 credit card numbers of its customers who visited …

While the recession is making an impact on consumer spending generally, PIN debit card usage is faring considerably better than that of signature debit. Indeed, PIN debit transactions by consumers grew 15% between July and December, the period during which the economic downturn began making itself felt, nearly four times …

The effort to extend PIN debit to Web-based commerce embraced credit unions this week with the announcement by the Credit Union 24 electronic funds transfer network that it will pilot technology from Acculynk Inc., an Atlanta-based software company. The network, which links more than 100,000 ATMs and almost 500,000 point-of-sale …

In an indication of how fast mobile banking is developing as a mainstream product for financial institutions, Fiserv Inc. this week released a version of its Mobile Money software that could let banks deploy a mobile-banking service in three months or less. The new version, called Mobile Money FastTrack, is …

Four years later, the fallout from the notorious CardSystems Solutions Inc. data breach?at the time the biggest hacking of payment card data ever?surfaced last week and looks like it could go on for months or even years. Merchant acquirer Merrick Bank Corp. is suing Savvis Inc., the company that inspected …

The Federal Reserve Banks should adapt the automated clearing house network to compete directly with private-sector networks for debit card processing, the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City said this week. “The Federal Reserve could enhance competition in payment card markets by positioning ACH services as an …