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10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 10 Years and years of finger-crossing while pushing ever-more unprotected financial account data across an expanding array of vulnerable origination points and networks have come to a sudden and long overdue demise. When and how the electronic payments industry finally gets serious …
Read More »How Pay By Touch Hopes to Use Opticard to Add Merchants, ISOs
Pay By Touch Inc., the San Francisco company best known for its biometric authentication system for point-of-sale transactions, this week saw its merchant-processing unit take a step calculated to extend its reach into new merchant markets and attract more independent sales organizations to resell its services. Under this week's agreement, …
Read More »Police Arrest Four in Stop & Shop Breach As Legislation Looms
Hackers frequently go free, but Coventry, R.I., police late Monday night arrested four California men suspected in the recent theft of debit and credit card data from PIN pads at grocery-store chain Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos. While the arrests are certainly good news to Stop & Shop and banks, …
Read More »TJX Reports Wider Breach, But No Data on Affected Accounts
Off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. on Wednesday divulged more information about the intrusion into its computer network that contained credit and debit card data, but one piece of information still eludes public disclosure: the actual number of accounts compromised. Earlier estimates put the figure as high as 40 million (Digital …
Read More »Stop & Shop’s PIN Pad Breach Follows Similar Cases in Canada
Although many details remain unclear, a security breach at a big supermarket chain in the Northeast bears some resemblance to a sophisticated rigging of point-of-sale equipment to capture PINs and other card data last year in Canada. Quincy, Mass.-based Stop & Shop Supermarket Cos., which has 385 stores in New …
Read More »Some Small Towns Loom Large in Latest ID Fraud Research
Merchants, card issuers, utilities, e-commerce operators, and other businesses looking to guard against identity fraud may want to take a closer look at applications coming from Floral Park, Queens, a part of New York City. They may also need to scrutinize new customers from Faulkton, S.D., population 800. That's because …
Read More »Long-Time Credit Card Exec Saunders Takes over Embryonic Visa Inc.
Credit card industry veteran Joseph W, Saunders has resigned his position as president of card services at Washington Mutual Inc. to become executive chairman of Visa Inc., the entity Visa announced last fall as the planned publicly held company embodying all of its worldwide operating divisions except that for Europe …
Read More »Data Breaches Don’t Spur As Much Fraud As Stolen Cards, Other Causes
Data breaches, including the recently disclosed hack at off-price retailer TJX Cos. Inc. (Digital Transactions News, Jan. 22), garner a lot of headlines, but they paint a misleading picture about the resulting dangers, according to some experts. While an estimated 30% of consumers have been exposed to data breaches, only …
Read More »The Industry’s Self-Denial About the Maturing of Credit Cards
10 Tipping Points for the Payments Industry Part 6 The venerable credit card has been, by most measures, the most successful retail financial-services product in the past half-century. But even die-hard proponents can in good conscience no longer deny the growing evidence that the market for signature-based credit cards has …
Read More »PCI Council Adds Members, Hires First General Manager
Despite concerns over the recent hack at retailer TJX Cos. Inc. and other data breaches, the head of the organization overseeing the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards is optimistic that card networks, merchants, and financial institutions are on the road to more secure payments. “Compliance is often a …
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