Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
VeriFone Holdings Inc. swung to a welcome $3.69 million profit in its fourth fiscal 2009 quarter and sees evidence of recovery in its global markets, but the leading U.S. point-of-sale terminal provider isn't expecting a rebound in its North American business for a while. “It's still kind of a shaky …
Read More »After a Difficult Year, Lawlor Exits As CEO at Online Resources
Matthew P. Lawlor, the co-founder, chairman, and chief executive of Online Resources Corp., is retiring immediately as chief executive, the company announced early Tuesday. Lawlor will remain as chairman until Feb. 15 to assist with the transition, and then scale back to serving on the board of directors of the …
Read More »Early Results Are Inconclusive for NACHA’s New IAT Code
The first statistics about the new automated clearing house code for international transactions are in, though it's too soon to draw conclusions about how popular the so-called IAT code will become. According to NACHA, governing body of the ACH, IAT had 303,802 transactions in September with a total value of …
Read More »C-Stores Prepare New Anti-Interchange Petition Drive
Retailers fighting what they say are high payment-card acceptance costs are not letting the heated debates about health care or President Obama's planned troop surge in Afghanistan push interchange off the political stage. The NACS?The Association for Convenience and Petroleum Retailing, next week will launch what it calls Phase 2 …
Read More »Square Gets Points for Cleverness, But Leaves Questions Unanswered
If hype augurs success, the new Square payments application for mobile merchants is off to a promising start. The product, announced this week by a San Francisco startup called Square Inc., is attracting attention not just in the payments business but in the wider business community. That's because Square's founder …
Read More »AmEx To Buy Revolution Money in an Alternative-Payment Play
American Express Co. is acquiring Revolution Money Inc. for $300 million in a move the two companies say will help the travel-and-entertainment card giant move into next-generation electronic payments while providing a major boost for Revolution's nascent Internet-based payments platform. The deal enhances AmEx's position in the alternative-payments niche, but …
Read More »NCR’s Pilot for Movie-Download Kiosks Opens New Transaction Market
A new source of potential payment card transaction volume opened up this week when ATM and kiosk manufacturer NCR Corp. and software provider MOD Systems Inc. announced a pilot in which consumers can download digital movies and TV shows from kiosks. Just as DVDs displaced VHS tapes for movie rentals, …
Read More »A Battle for Deposits Helps Fuel Bank Interest in P2P Payments
Mercantile Bank of Michigan has an answer for observers who want to know why financial institutions are starting to show an interest in person-to-person payments. It comes down to competition for deposits, says John Schulte, senior vice president and chief information officer at the bank, which will introduce a commercial …
Read More »PayPal Unveils Platform X, And with It an Array of APIs And New Pricing
Hoping to inspire a burst of innovation beyond what it could expect to deliver within its own research-and-development budget, PayPal Inc. on Tuesday officially turned its global payment engine over to software developers with an array of new application programming interfaces (APIs). With the unveiling of the APIs, which took …
Read More »Cynergy Data Starts Life Anew After a Trip to Bankruptcy Court
Cynergy Data LLC, the big independent sales organization that filed for bankruptcy Sept. 1, got a second lease on life last week when the sale of its assets to The ComVest Group, a private-equity firm with holdings in other payment processors, closed. ComVest paid $81 million for Long Island City, …
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