Marketing

Seeking to broaden its reach as it rolls out to merchants nationally, Vayusa Inc. has begun to recruit independent sales organizations to sell its MobileLime cell-phone-based loyalty and rewards system. MobileLime, which earlier this year signed its first merchant outside the Northeast, this week announced Vision Payments Solutions LLC, a …

In another indication of the erosion of paper checks in consumer transactions, the volume of bill payments made by check as a fraction of all bill payments has fallen to 37.5% from 61.1% four years ago, according to a report released this week by online bill-payment processor CheckFree Corp. with …

The youth market may not be the slam dunk for mobile payments that payment processors, card issuers, and merchant acquirers have thought it would be. According to survey results released this week, some 62% of persons aged 16 to 43?the so-called Gen X and Gen Y?say that using cell phones …

Long quiet on the reseller front, First National Merchant Solutions is signing up independent sales organizations as part of a strategic shift mapped out by its new president, Diana M. Mehochko. The merchant-acquiring unit of First National Bank of Omaha signed up half a dozen ISOs last year and is …

A year after it acquired the 50% interest in Vital Processing Services that it didn't already own, Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has renamed the merchant-acquiring processor TSYS Acquiring Solutions and announced several new product lines. The Columbus, Ga.-based company, which is known primarily as a processor for card-issuing banks, …

Boulder, Colo.-based Combined Payments Inc.'s FastLane, a new network that converts driver's licenses into loyalty and payment cards, Thursday announced that it had secured its first advertiser as part of a point-of-sale program that will share revenues with participating merchants. The $2 million deal involves the La Jolla, Calif., office …

Electronic point-of-sale transactions secured by biometric scans may get a boost now that Pay By Touch Inc. has switched on processing service in 204 Jewel-Osco stores in the Chicago area as well as in the rest of Illionois, and in Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The San Francisco company's latest implementation …

Boston-based Vayusa Inc., whose MobileLime network serves some 80 merchants for payments initiated from consumers' cell phones, plans to begin supporting transactions based on the near-field-communication (NFC) standard in the second quarter. Announcing its new NFC platform today, the company says consumers with MobileLime accounts will be able to use …

December was an ominous month for banks, retailers, processors, and other service providers concerned about the safety of the Internet commerce channel. Although the reported number of phishing incidents declined in the last month of last year, that drop masked alarming increases in the number of malicious Web sites launching …

Four months after introducing a marketing system that communicates with customers' mobile phones, Broadway Marketplace has had such positive sales results its top executive says the Cambridge, Mass.-based supermarket will add an electronic payment function within the next two months. The store, which last September began using a service called …