Health-care electronic funds transfers via the automated clearing house network increased by 177% from October 2013, the first full month a new rule intended to spur such payments was in effect, through September 2014, ACH governing body NACHA reported Monday. Herndon, Va.-based NACHA says transaction volume in September was 15.5 …

With Black Friday results nearly in the books, the holiday-shopping season has officially started, though some observers argue it really began this year on Thanksgiving day itself with a flurry of mobile commerce. Much of that commerce is being driven by users of Apple Inc. devices. Controlling by far the …

  No doubt merchants and the payments industry understand the value of removing valuable cardholder data from merchant payment systems via tokenization. Doing so, however, may complicate merchants\' data-security practices and carry costs, suggests Avivah Litan, vice president and analyst at advisory firm Gartner Inc., in a blog post. Tokenization …

Electronic-commerce spending from work and home desktop computers from Nov 1-23 hit $17.5 billion, up 11% from $15.8 billion in the same period a year earlier, Internet metrics firm comScore Inc. reported Tuesday. Most e-commerce spending is charged to credit and debit payment cards, so the early results for the …

  Consumers want gift cards this holiday season, but are reluctant to ask for them, finds a survey from CashStar Inc., a Portland, Maine-based company that specializes in e-coupons and digital gift cards. Meanwhile the National Retail Federation forecasts that consumers will spend $31.74 billion on gift cards this holiday …

In what observers say indicates a growing acceptance of merchant aggregation by payment networks, MasterCard Inc. has increased by 10 times the charge-volume threshold at which a so-called sub-merchant must get its own merchant account. In addition, MasterCard’s recent rule changes preserve back-office settlement procedures that, had the old $100,000 …

USA Technologies Inc. on Friday announced it had secured a three-year agreement with Visa Inc. that will allow the supplier of payments technology for vending machines to continue receiving favorable small-ticket interchange pricing from the network. In the announcement, contained in a brief regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange …

Target Corp. reported Wednesday that expenses stemming from the big data breach it disclosed 11 months ago now total $248 million. The Home Depot Inc., meanwhile, said Tuesday that the data breach it disclosed in September cost it $28 million on a pre-tax basis in its recently ended third quarter. …

The U.S. Marshals Service held its first auction of bitcoins in June, and now it’s planning an even bigger one for Dec. 4. Like the June 27 auction, the 50,000 bitcoins to be auctioned by sealed bid were seized in October 2013 from Ross Ulbricht, the alleged operator of the …

  First Data Corp. will update its TransArmor tokenization service in 2015 to make it platform-agnostic, while expanding the number of sales channels it is available through, says a First Data executive. Launched in 2010, TransArmor provides merchants a way to mask sensitive cardholder data by replacing them with a …