Leading payment card processor First Data Corp., in the midst of a reorganization and spin-off of its Western Union money-transfer business, late Thursday reported first-quarter earnings of $373.3 million, down slightly from $374.5 million in 2005's first quarter. Revenues grew 10% to $2.70 billion from the year-earlier period's $2.47 billion. …

Visa USA's announcement this week of a new program to foster card transactions in the growing category of small-value payments would seem at first blush to be the bank card network's answer to some observers' long-held contention that the card associations should create incentives for the emerging technology of contactless …

NACHA's long-expected pilot project to test Internet payments to retailers and billers will get under way early next year and will run for 12 months, the Herndon, Va.-based organization said Monday. In a conference call it held to explain the new automated clearing house payment application and discuss the rationale …

Boulder, Colo.-based Combined Payments Inc.'s FastLane, a new network that converts driver's licenses into loyalty and payment cards, Thursday announced that it had secured its first advertiser as part of a point-of-sale program that will share revenues with participating merchants. The $2 million deal involves the La Jolla, Calif., office …

PayPal Inc. today officially joined the race for mobile-phone transactions, announcing the commercial availability of its much-anticipated PayPal Mobile service. The product, word of which leaked two weeks ago while the San Jose, Calif.-based processor was testing it with its own employees and those of parent company eBay Inc., comes …

Seeking to remove a roadblock standing in the way to eventual mass consumer usage of mobile phones equipped with a form of contactless technology called near-field communication (NFC), MasterCard International this week unveiled a service that will allow cell-phone users to download their account data and other critical information to …

Shipments of contactless-payment transponders–the cards, keyfobs, and other devices consumers use to make radio-wave payments at the point of sale?will explode in 2006, reaching 45 million units, up from 13 million last year, according to ABI Research, an Oyster Bay, N.Y., research firm that follows radio-frequency-identification technology markets. Most of …

The phishing trend, which took an ominous turn upward in the closing days of 2005, has grown even more menacing, with both the number of phishing-related e-mails and the number of Web sites hosting phishing attacks increasing by double-digit percentages in January, according to the latest report from the Anti-Phishing …

PayPal Inc.'s new payment service for mobile phones, which the eBay Inc. processing unit is expected to launch commercially within a few weeks, will have to offer more than basic person-to-person payments to be a success, one expert observer says. “I think it will need to go beyond just P2P …

In the spin-the-bottle game of assessing blame for the massive debit card breach that has compromised an estimated 600,000 accounts, point-of-sale software developer Fujitsu Transaction Solutions Inc. late last week suddenly found itself the recipient of unwelcome publicity when its name came up in a Visa USA alert about card …