ATM-owning banks are earning $4.3 billion annually on charges they levy on transactions cardholders perform on so-called foreign machines?ATMs owned by banks where the cardholder is not a customer, according to a semi-annual study released today by Bankrate Inc., North Palm Beach, Fla., an aggregator of financial data. The average …

The new chief executive of First Data Corp. is likely to bring renewed focus to the processing giant's merchant-acquiring business and move quickly to resolve the drag on growth represented by the company's processing business that supports card issuers, say industry observers. At the same time, Henry C. (Ric) Duques, …

Both transaction volume and site performance overall gave online merchants reasons to smile in the weekend leading up to “Cyber Monday,” the day experts say is the busiest shopping day of the year online. Merchants appear to have souped up their servers to meet increasing traffic, as well as rising …

The banks that own MasterCard Inc. cleared the way today for the bank card network to offer stock to the public and to reconstitute its governing board. By an overwhelming margin in a special meeting of shareholders, MasterCard’s shareholders approved the company’s proposal for an initial public offering that will …

This may be the year contactless payment gained a foothold among banks and merchants, but another technology?biometrically secured point-of-sale payments?is starting to gain momentum, as well. BioPay LLC, a provider of the technology for both POS transactions and payroll check-cashing, says it expects in 2006 to double, and possibly triple, …

The U.S. cash-payment market is enormous, but banks' hopes of penetrating it with so-called contactless technology could falter if high acceptance costs spur merchants to look at alternative electronic payment methods. That's one among a number of findings in a new study released this week on the market for transactions …

U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $22.3 billion in the third quarter, up 26.7% from the year-ago period, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Transactions on the Internet now account for 2.3% of all U.S. retail sales, according to the latest figures, the highest share yet for …

Pre-holiday spending volume on Visa cards continued to build in the week through Sunday, with overall transactions increasing 18.8%, to 405.6 million ($22.7 billion in dollar volume), over the same week a year ago. Activity on the Internet and in fast-food chains, two closely watched emerging spending categories, increased 22.5% …

Fraudsters sent out fewer phishing e-mail campaigns in September, but they operated from more Web sites, launched several opportunistic campaigns?including ones designed to steal donations intended for Hurricane Katrina victims?and became even more inventive in their use of keyloggers and other malware. The number of unique phishing reports received by …

With identify fraud posing a serious challenge to online bankers and merchants, technology vendors are starting to respond with hardware- and software-based solutions offering so-called strong authentication, which adds a second factor of identity to the standard user-name/password pair. Now Corillian Corp. has launched a product it says is the …