At the stroke of a pen, Bill Me Later Inc. has not only become the sole third-party alternative payment vehicle accepted by the world's largest retailing Web site, but it also receives an injection of capital as that site, Amazon.com Inc., takes an undisclosed equity stake in the Timonium, Md.-based …

In a development that could long complicate the introduction of commercial services allowing consumers to make point-of-sale payments with their mobile phones, mobile network operators say they will derive POS payment revenue chiefly from consumer transaction fees. According to research released this week, some 83% of carriers responding to an …

A clarification of a rule regarding transaction aggregation, announced last week by NACHA, was driven chiefly by banks that intended to hamper a new PIN debit card being introduced by Capital One Financial Corp., sources tell Digital Transactions News. The new card, which came to light late this spring (Digital …

Nearly a year and a half after first enlisting bank-card merchant acquirers to sign small and mid-size merchants for Discover acceptance, Discover Financial Services LLC says the program is doing just what the company intended. “We’ve seen excellent results,” Matt Johanson, vice president of acquirer relations at Riverwoods, Ill.-based Discover, …

NACHA, the rules-setting body for the automated clearing house network, this week announced membership approval of a rule amendment that will raise fines for unauthorized transactions and cut off ACH access for companies that enter too many such payments into the network. NACHA has also issued a rules clarification that …

A courtroom food fight of sorts has broken out between big merchant processor Heartland Payment Systems Inc. and a leading hospitality-industry technology provider supported by a network gateway owned by No. 1 merchant acquirer Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC. Princeton, N.J.-based Heartland today said it has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit …

In a development that could lend considerable momentum to efforts to bring PIN debit to the Internet, Costco Wholesale Corp. is investigating at least three technologies that would allow the retailing giant to accept PIN debit cards for payment on its Web site, according to sources familiar with the matter. …

An outside manager with restructuring experience, Thomas Lumsden of FTI Consulting Inc., is now running financially troubled biometric-payment provider Pay By Touch under terms of a Delaware court order signed Friday, San Francisco-based Pay By Touch announced on Monday. The Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington appointed Lumsden, senior managing director …

AT&T Inc., which on Tuesday announced it is launching a nationwide mobile-banking service, expects to have 500,000 mobile phones preloaded with the software necessary for the service by the end of the year and 10 million handsets so equipped by the close of 2008, according to a senior executive with …

Visa Inc. late Friday said it aims to raise $10 billion in its upcoming initial public offering of stock. The figure, while preliminary, is four times the $2.4 billion MasterCard Inc. grossed in its May 2006 IPO, the first chance the market had to value a bank card network. A …