Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
A small San Diego company is working on a new type of transaction card that combines the characteristics of a compact disk and a mag-stripe card, allowing consumers to perform both credit and debit transactions online as well as at physical points of sale. U.S. Encode Corp., incorporated in 2002, …
Read More »How Interchange Wars Are Lending Impetus to Instant Issuance
Heightened tensions over interchange fees are helping to fuel expansion in the market for so-called instant issuance of payment plastics. Englewood, Colo.-based Dynamic Card Solutions, which produces software that lets banks issue Visa- and MasterCard-branded debit cards on the spot to customers, says its revenue grew 53% in 2005, without …
Read More »The FTC Puts One Security Compromise to Rest, But More Await
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday a proposed settlement with the successor to CardSystems Solutions Inc., the merchant processor that gained notoriety last year as the source of the largest known compromise of financial data to date. The settlement, which did not include fines, arose out of the FTC's …
Read More »Metavante Appoints New Health-Payments Chief, Looks for Big Growth
Eyeing an expanding opportunity in debit card processing for health-related accounts, Metavante Corp. has appointed a president for its Healthcare Payments Solutions division. John M. Reynolds, a 20-year veteran in banking and a former executive at Wells Fargo Institutional Trust Service, takes over the unit, which was formed only last …
Read More »Discover Unveils a Signature Debit Card, Though No Issuers Yet
Morgan Stanley's Discover Financial Services LLC today launched a signature-based debit card, dubbed Discover Debit, as the second major prong in its debit card offensive. Because signature-based debit delivers higher income to issuers than PIN debit, observers have looked for such a product from Discover ever since the Riverwoods, Ill.-based …
Read More »Seeking More Issuers, Debitman Finds Two Among the Supermarkets
Debitman Card Inc., which has been seeking issuers for its PIN debit processing network, announced two this week. Binghamton Giant Markets Inc. and HAC Inc., both regional supermarket chains, have agreed to issue cards on Debitman's network. HAC, which runs 67 stores in Oklahoma and Kansas, has begun issuing Debitman …
Read More »With Some Network Help, ShopNBC Cuts Its Prepaid Card Losses
Writeoffs stemming from transactions on prepaid cards, which had been swelling at online merchant ShopNBC, have eased considerably in the past few months, the retailer reports. Bad debt attributable to the plastic accounted for 3% of total writeoffs for 2005 at ShopNBC, which sells jewelry and electronic gear online at …
Read More »Phishing Trends Take an Ominous Turn As Malware Incidents Rise
Afer a let-up last summer, the phishing scourge appears to be getting worse. The Anti-Phishing Working Group reports the number of unique phishing attacks grew 6.7% in November over the count in October, to 16,882. This represents a new record high for the online fraud, in which criminals use bogus …
Read More »Visa Reports $257 Billion for ’05 Holiday Season, with a Dec. 23 Peak
In its final holiday-spending report for the season, Visa USA said today retail spending on its cards hit $257 billion for November and December 2005, up 17.5% from the same period in 2004. Visa says e-commerce activity for the holiday-shopping season totaled $26.5 billion, peaking at $624 million on Dec. …
Read More »Nearly Three Years Later, Merchants Begin to Get Wal-Mart Payouts
The first checks to merchants entitled to some of the $3.1 billion settlement fund in the Visa/MasterCard debit card antitrust lawsuit went out last month, but that was only a small fraction of the expected total distribution from what is widely known as the Wal-Mart settlement. That's according to the …
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