Credit Cards

The highest delinquency rate ever seen on credit cards did little to dampen transactions on the cards during the critical holiday season. The American Bankers Association reports today that late payments on credit cards reached a record 4.09% of all accounts in the third quarter of 2003, up from 4.04% …

The record transaction volume recorded online this holiday shopping season also put record strains on Web sites' ability to handle the load. According to data from Keynote Systems Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based site-performance management company, both response time and success rate for Web transactions improved in the week ending …

Nashville, Tenn.-based independent sales organization iPayment Inc. expects on Wednesday to close on its $55 million cash acquisition of an agent-bank portfolio from First Data Corp. The portfolio consists of 18,000 small merchant accounts controlled by 170 agent banks and generating about $4 billion in annual card volume. First Data …

Yahoo Finance, whose PayDirect person-to-person payment service has been in operation domestically for three years, is now offering PayDirect International to allow electronic remittances from domestic users to recipients overseas. Announced this week, the new international payment service is an effort by Yahoo Finance, a unit of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo …

Airlines are taking advantage of the onset of one of the year's heaviest travel seasons to promote their electronic self-service check-in and ticketing machines. Both American Airlines and America West today released statements touting their airport kiosks and encouraging customers to use them in the coming days to avoid long …

A major study on consumer payment preferences at the point of sale released today shows not only a stronger trend toward debit cards generally but also a stronger preference for cards secured by personal identification numbers rather than by signatures. This is despite strong promotion from the major card companies …

Wendy's International Inc. announced today that more than 3,000 of its U.S. stores now accept credit cards and that more locations are being added to the program each week. By year's end the fast-food chain expects to have more than 70% of its U.S. outlets accepting cards using its satellite …

With fraud and identity-theft headlines appearing nearly every day, the pressure is on to offer more risk-management services at the point of sale, and this, some experts say, is leading to rising interest in POS terminals capable of operating on Internet Protocol connections. Such connections, they argue, make it easier …

A survey of more than 170 senior-level executives for electronic payments processors, networks, and online merchants at a micropayments conference held earlier this month indicates a majority of the online merchants in attendance will be selling content with a micropayments system within a year. The survey, whose results were released …

Separate studies of online transaction fraud released this week cast new light on the problem of fraudulent Web transactions. The rate of online fraud is declining, according to a survey of online merchants conducted in October by CyberSource, Mountain View, Calif., a processor of online transactions. But indirect costs resulting …