Acquiring

Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …

Point-of-sale terminal maker Hypercom Corp. on Monday said it is talking with France-based Ingenico about the $332 million buyout offer Ingenico made last week, an offer that came at a time when Phoenix, Ariz.-based Hypercom is trying to buy the POS terminal unit of another French company, Thales S.A. Ingenico …

Much ado is made about stopping phishing scams, database breaches, and related payment card fraud before it actually happens. But what about legitimate transactions that subsequently generate questionable or outright fraudulent chargebacks, leaving the merchant without revenue after having shipped the goods? A New York payments company called Chargeback File …

Newly independent of their founding bank owners, payment card processors Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) and Metavante Technologies Inc. weighed in this week with their fourth-quarter financials. The numbers by and large showed growth after a thicket of one-time spin-off and other expenses is cleared away, but both companies have …

Banks and processors looking for a way in to the potentially lucrative market for health-care payments could do worse than to cultivate that market for remote deposit capture, says an expert in electronic check processing. But while hospitals and clinics represent a wide-open opportunity for banks, it's not one that …

E-commerce sales increases outpaced those at brick-and-mortar merchants during the 2007 holiday shopping season (Digital Transactions News, Jan. 14), and that strong growth along with the recruitment of new online merchants gave a fourth-quarter lift to Internet transaction processor PayPal Inc. The San Jose, Calif.-based company handled 203.9 million transactions …

U.S. Bancorp's Nova Information Services Inc. merchant-acquiring subsidiary is diving headfirst into the increasingly competitive payment-gateway business with its pending acquisition of Southern DataComm Inc., a gateway with a big presence in the hospitality sector. Largo, Fla.-based Southern DataComm handles an estimated $50 billion-plus in annualized payment volume, according to …

Merchants accounting for two-thirds of Visa Inc.'s U.S. transaction volume have validated compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, Visa reported on Tuesday. This latest report from Visa comes in the wake of a Dec. 31 deadline for so-called Level 2 merchants?mid-sized merchants that submit 1 million …

While 2007-08 holiday-season spending overall fell short of expectations, e-commerce sales soared, according to final numbers compiled by Dallas-based processor Chase Paymentech Solutions LLC. Ten online merchants for which Chase Paymentech processes transactions saw their total traffic jump 29% for the season, to 108.4 million transactions. Dollar volume grew at …

Biometric-authentication and loyalty-services technology provider Pay By Touch is in bankruptcy, has cut costs drastically, and is shopping some of its subsidiaries, but the company's former chief executive–who is now a member of the firm's newly constituted board of directors–says Pay By Touch is solid at its core. “This company …