Marketing

The product has been available for only two weeks, but Google Inc.'s online payment service has already won considerable favor with at least some Internet merchants and companies that process online transactions. Meanwhile, some analysts caution that even if Google Checkout, the online search giant's name for its long-expected entry …

Wachovia Corp., some of whose debit card holders have been victimized by a data breach that happened several months ago, began sending notices and replacement cards to those customers recently because it began to see signs of fraud after months of monitoring the accounts, the bank says. Although Wachovia's action …

Armed with $15 million in new venture capital, San Francisco-based Xoom Corp. is embarking on the next phase of its growth plan: selling Internet-based money-transfer services to banks, retailers and smaller money-transfer operators (MTOs) that can put their own brands on them and sell them to consumers. Founded in 2002, …

Think of electronic bill payments and, not surprisingly, the Internet usually comes to mind first. But many billers, especially banks, have yet to offer bill payments through telephone-based customer-service systems or automated interactive voice-response units, experts tell Digital Transactions magazine in an upcoming story on expedited bill payments. The Web's …

Mobile gambling, which doesn't now exist as a market in North America, will grow to $3.34 billion in revenue by 2011, accounting for 14% of a $23.2 billion world market, according to research released this week. Driving this growth, says Juniper Research Ltd., which published the research, are the rapid …

A multi-faceted marketing partnership between giant Internet portal Yahoo! Inc. and PayPal Inc., announced last week, seems likely to drive a significant flow of transaction volume to online auction provider eBay Inc.'s payment service. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo! is the No. 2 parent company in terms of visited …

National City Corp., Cleveland, has begun selling a so-called non-personalized version of Visa USA's TravelMoney prepaid card, which replaces traveler's checks. National City, which is the sole major bank issuing either personalized or non-personalized versions of Visa's plastic for travelers, is offering instant issue of the new card, embossed with …

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 …