Acquiring

The legal battle over the bank card associations' interchange pricing arrangements, already red-hot, got even hotter today when four retail trade associations slapped Visa U.S.A., MasterCard International, and several major banks with a class-action antitrust suit. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New …

CyberSource Corp.'s deal to acquire the assets of CardSystems Inc. would hand the Mountain View, Calif.-based transaction-gateway provider a major sales channel for both card-present and Web-based payment processing, catapulting the company squarely into the ranks of processors for small and mid-sized multi-channel merchants, according to observers. The move also …

A top official of a regional gasoline marketers' association who wrote a letter to Congress earlier this month calling for regulation of bank card interchange fees says he would like to see the federal government impose a cap on interchange. “They need to look at Australia [where banking regulators last …

Having gotten its feet wet with song downloads, PayPal Inc. is marching full-bore into micropayments. The San Jose, Calif.-based payments processor announced today new, cut-rate merchant pricing on transactions under $2 for digital content, which the company defines as video games, online greeting cards, news articles, and mobile-phone content such …

Point-of-sale terminal maker VeriFone Holdings Inc., which early this year led a long-awaited and closely watched initial public offering, reports its net income for the quarter ended July 31 reached $6.5 million, under generally accepted accounting principles. This represents a swing to a profit from the $2.9 million loss the …

Online Resource Corp. next month will begin a pilot of an online merchant database it hopes will allow issuers to resolve consumer questions regarding card payments, stopping them from becoming expensive retrieval requests and chargebacks. The new service will be tried out with an unnamed top-five debit card issuer, the …

In a sign that independent sales organizations specializing in e-commerce are achieving a higher profile, e-onlinedata said today it has signed up its 2,500th reseller. It also estimates it will pay out more than $1.5 million in bonuses and residuals over the next year. Resellers for e-onlinedata, which is itself …

Citigroup Inc.'s decision to bail out of the merchant-acquiring business, which was announced yesterday, could benefit both the banking kingpin and the buyer of the 15,000-location portfolio, processing giant First Data Corp. But Denver-based FDC may emerge as the bigger winner, some observers say, now that Citi has decided to …

At a time when new ATM deployment has been slow, one independent deployer of the machines has found a big payoff from a novel approach to cobranding ATMs with banks. Since announcing its cobranding deal about 18 months ago, Houston-based Cardtronics Inc. has been able to get more than 800 …

The disclosure by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in late July that it plans to charter an industrial bank in Utah to acquire its own payment transactions is creating more questions than answers about current relationships between the world's largest retailer and the payments entities with whom it currently works. Bentonville, Ark.-based …