The Capitol Hill spotlight shone again on payment card acceptance costs Thursday when a U.S. House of Representatives antitrust panel held a hearing to investigate interchange. At issue is the question whether the federal government should play any role regarding this most controversial aspect of card pricing. Bank interests are …

A startup company managed by former executives from online travel agency Orbitz LLC plans to release in the fourth quarter a software product that will let online merchants manage the gamut of transaction fraud issues, from front-end screening to automated order review to chargeback processing and, eventually, back-end collections and …

More large merchants now meet the dictates of the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, according to new numbers from Visa U.S.A. At the same time, Visa, the biggest payment-card network, is turning its security attention to small merchants, the source of the majority of data breaches. Visa and …

Billeo Inc., whose software streamlines online bill payment for consumers, this week announced new product enhancements that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company hopes will allow banks to earn more bill-payment revenue. It also extends the company's reach into online shopping with a new software component that automatically fills out online …

With an eye to Capital One Financial Corp.'s introduction last month of a so-called decoupled debit card product, which relies on settlement through the automated clearing house network and so does not require cardholders to have a demand-deposit account with Cap One (Digital Transactions News, June 7), debit network sponsor …

Though still growing in volume from month to month, substitute checks now account for only about one-third of total image-exchange traffic between banks, according to the latest industrywide data. By contrast, a year ago these costly paper printouts of check images amounted to 56% of all image-exchange volume. At the …

The booming popularity of prepaid cards has created opportunities for payments companies far beyond just issuing plastic cards. The reloading of already-issued prepaid cards, for instance, is emerging as a major business. And that means Monrovia, Calif.-based Green Dot Corp.'s 40,000-location reload network is attracting attention from such big companies …

It's the summer of change in the executive suites of some major payment-industry companies. Two days after No. 1 processor First Data Corp. named a new chief executive, struggling payment-terminal manufacturer Hypercom Corp. announced that William Keiper, its chief executive for not quite two years, would leave his post Aug …

PayPal Inc.'s much-anticipated mobile-commerce service made its official debut this week in a development PayPal executive Kevin Dulsky calls a “game-changing” event for the electronic-transactions business. The launch of PayPal Mobile Checkout, which claims at least 20 merchants signed up so far, follows weeks of speculation about the m-commerce version …

The U.S Patent and Trademark Office has upheld substantially all of the claims contained in a key patent held by DataTreasury Corp. that covers processes related to check image exchange. The USPTO decision, reached in May but not made public until recently, follows a formal process in which Plano, Texas-based …