Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
Some 34% of small merchants invest more in locking down products and cash in their stores than in securing customer data, while the proportion doing the opposite is one-fifth, according to survey results released Monday. In addition, though 64% of the merchants say they had taken steps within the last …
Read More »Networks Begin to Make a Case for Cards at Vending Machines
Transaction Network Services Inc., which is routing wireless card transactions for Pepsi Co. at 500 vending machines, plans to boost that count to 10,000 machines across the country in 2007. TNS executives tell Digital Transactions in a story for the upcoming July-August issue that higher transactions tickets are helping to …
Read More »ISOs And NFC Specs Lend Impetus to Contactless Payment Trend
New technical specifications for so-called near-field communication (NFC), released this week by an international rules-setting body backing the technology, should add momentum in the U.S. to the trend toward contactless payments on mobile phones. “A lot's happening behind closed doors,” says Erik Michielsen, director of RFID and M2M research at …
Read More »MobileLime Recruits First ISO in Effort to Sell Merchants Nationally
Seeking to broaden its reach as it rolls out to merchants nationally, Vayusa Inc. has begun to recruit independent sales organizations to sell its MobileLime cell-phone-based loyalty and rewards system. MobileLime, which earlier this year signed its first merchant outside the Northeast, this week announced Vision Payments Solutions LLC, a …
Read More »Merchants Hit MasterCard IPO on Anticompetitive Grounds
A law firm co-leading the merchant class-action interchange lawsuit against Visa USA, MasterCard Inc. and a number of their large members yesterday filed a supplemental complaint in federal court asserting that MasterCard's imminent initial public offering of stock is an attempt to shield itself from antitrust liability for past interchange …
Read More »A Boom Is Building in FSA Debit Cards, But Challenges Remain
Because of the efficiency, savings, and convenience they bring to a system traditionally choked with paper, debit cards linked to flexible-spending accounts (FSAs) are turning into a hot growth market in electronic payments. Issuers will put 6 million of the cards in circulation in 2006, up 50% over last year …
Read More »Wal-Mart Claims Its Bank Could Stop Transactions for PCI Non-Compliance
Critics blasted away at Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s plan to open a Utah industrial loan corporation for most of three days in late April, and now the world's biggest retailer is firing back. Wal-Mart filed a 14-page letter earlier this month with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. addressing the major concerns …
Read More »Newly Private iPayment Logs Profit Jump, Points to CardSystems Fallout
The final quarterly filing from iPayment Inc. as a public company contains a report of a double-digit gain in profit at the Nashville, Tenn.-based merchant acquirer as well as a terse reference to what amounts to continuing fallout from the huge data breach last year at Atlanta-based merchant processor CardSystems …
Read More »Home Depot: No Designs on Payments with Deal to Buy ILC
In sharp contrast to Wal-Mart Stores Inc., leading home-improvement retailer Home Depot Inc. professes no intentions of getting into the payments business even though, like Wal-Mart, it plans to operate a Utah-chartered industrial loan corporation, or ILC, that would give it an entrée into financial services. Less than a month …
Read More »Heartland Drives up Net with Expanded Merchant Base, Card Volume
Heartland Payment Systems Inc., one of the few publicly traded independent sales organizations, today reported its revenues jumped 39% in the first quarter, to $236.8 million, on a 34% increase in transaction volume, to $9.2 billion. Net income for the period came to $4.39 million, a 63% increase. The Princeton, …
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