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The trend toward combining electronic bill-payment services?particularly payments that post on the same day they're made?with walk-in remittance locations took on more momentum last week with the announcement that Online Resources Corp. will process expedited payments for DolEx Dollar Express Inc., a remittance operation belonging to Atlanta-based Global Payments Inc. …
Read More »PayPal To Roll out New Fraud Filters with Channel Partners by January
Online auctioneer eBay Inc. and its PayPal payments service are generating headlines this week for enhancing their coverage of buyers' and sellers' losses when sales go bad. Less noticed but also important for merchants, however, are the enhanced risk controls for merchants that PayPal is quietly rolling out. Dubbed Fraud …
Read More »Revolution Money Aims for 1 Million Merchants, Cardholders by Year End
Nine months after its official launch, Revolution Money Inc.'s PIN-secured credit card is being accepted at 150,000 merchants, a number a top executive at the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based alternative-payments provider says will reach 1 million by year's end. David Cautin, senior vice president and general manager for online business at …
Read More »MasterCard Plans to Have U.S. P-to-P Service Launched by Early ’09
Eyeing opportunities in the U.S. person-to-person payments market, MasterCard Worldwide announced on Thursday it plans to begin testing a service based on mobile phones later this year and introduce a commercial service early in 2009. The card network will use its existing MoneySend remittance system to clear and settle transactions, …
Read More »How Customer Research Can Sort Out Alternative Payment Choices
Online sellers trying to sort out the plethora of alternative-payments choices?and make decisions regarding which, if any, to accept?should begin by asking questions about what business problems they are trying to solve, a retail executive said at an e-commerce trade show on Wednesday. “Once you understand what problem you're trying …
Read More »Global Security Fears Remain a Drag on Mobile Banking and Payments
Despite intense market-development efforts by tech vendors, processors, and some banks, mobile banking and payments still suffer from consumer distrust, according to results of an international survey released this week by Blue Bell, Pa.-based technology-services provider and server manufacturer Unisys Corp. Unisys, which commissioned a survey of more than 13,000 …
Read More »Study: POS Debit Rises, While Consumers Confirm PIN Preference
The use of debit cards for point-of-sale purchases is rising sharply, while cardholders continue to prefer PIN debit over signature debit, according to a study released recently by the Star electronic funds transfer network, a unit of Denver-based First Data Corp. The study is the latest in a series of …
Read More »Survey Finds Low Prepaid Market Penetration Among Underbanked
Despite lots of headlines, prepaid cards account for only a small share of payments by underbanked consumers, according to results of a survey released Monday by The Center for Financial Services Innovation, a non-profit affiliate of Chicago-based ShoreBank Corp. The national survey of 2,799 adults age 18 and older and …
Read More »How Tyfone Looks to Free Banks from Carriers in Mobile Payments
A provider of mobile-banking and ?payments software has begun promoting a memory card for cell phones that it says could allow financial institutions to move forward with contactless mobile payments without the need to work with wireless carriers. Portland Ore.-based Tyfone Inc., founded four years ago, is testing its Secure …
Read More »A Senate Letter Ratchets up the Heat on Networks over Interchange
A bipartisan letter last week from four U.S. senators to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. demanding information about how they set interchange rates is ratcheting up the pressure on the card networks, and it could represent another step on the U.S. road to joining about 20 other countries that either …
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