News

June, 2008

• 9 June

  Survey Finds Low Prepaid Market Penetration Among Underbanked

  Despite lots of headlines, prepaid cards account for only a small share of payments by underbanked consumers, according to results of a survey released Monday by The Center for Financial Services Innovation, a non-profit affiliate of Chicago-based ShoreBank Corp. The national survey of 2,799 adults age 18 and older and …
• 5 June

  Durbin Adds Senate Bill to House Effort to Rein in Interchange

  The other shoe dropped on bank card interchange Thursday afternoon when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., introduced a companion bill to the Credit Card Fair Fee Act of 2008 pending in the House of Representatives' Judiciary Committee. Durbin's bill, including its name, is nearly identical to the House version introduced …
• 4 June

  How Tyfone Looks to Free Banks from Carriers in Mobile Payments

  A provider of mobile-banking and ?payments software has begun promoting a memory card for cell phones that it says could allow financial institutions to move forward with contactless mobile payments without the need to work with wireless carriers. Portland Ore.-based Tyfone Inc., founded four years ago, is testing its Secure …
• 4 June

  How U.S. Bank Hopes To Catch a Wave in Contactless Payments

  Riding the swelling wave of issuer interest in contactless payment cards, Minneapolis-based U.S. Bancorp this week launched a program to issue Visa Inc.'s payWave contactless cards on debit accounts in California, Colorado, Missouri, and Utah. The bank didn't say how many cards it plans to issue. Customers who already have …
• 3 June

  Indiana Bank’s Debit Card Breach Underscores Issuer Vulnerability

  South Bend, Ind.-based 1st Source Bank is reissuing its entire portfolio of debit cards after a hacker or hackers broke into a bank server containing debit card data. No fraud has been discovered as a result of the intrusion, a bank executive tells Digital Transactions News. The $4.5-billion-asset bank with …
• 3 June

  New Electronic Benefit Options Score High in Michigan on First Day

  The state of Michigan has joined a trend, developing for the past couple of years, toward replacing paper benefit checks with electronic payment. The state on Tuesday announced it has started offering debit cards and direct-deposit options to citizens eligible to receive unemployment benefits. Michigan's Unemployment Insurance Agency (UIA), which …
• 2 June

  Researcher Sees Issuers’ Service Providers as PCI ‘Hot Spots’

  Six specialty types of vendors, processors, and other service providers that card issuers use lack specific guidelines on how to protect cardholder data under the Payment Card Industry data-security standard, or PCI, according to a recent report from research firm TowerGroup Inc. These service providers thus represent “hot spots” that …

May, 2008

• 30 May

  A Senate Letter Ratchets up the Heat on Networks over Interchange

  A bipartisan letter last week from four U.S. senators to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. demanding information about how they set interchange rates is ratcheting up the pressure on the card networks, and it could represent another step on the U.S. road to joining about 20 other countries that either …
• 29 May

  New ‘Mobile Lockbox’ Service Could Help Drive Expedited Payments

  A new service that lets consumers receive and pay bills on their handsets could help billers earn more income from last-minute payments customers make to avoid service shut-offs or late charges, observers say. The service, a so-called mobile lockbox, was announced last week by Wausau Financial Systems Inc., a provider …
• 28 May

  Payment Issues Figure Among Reasons for Checkout Abandonment

  Various issues with payment methods loom large among reasons consumers give for abandoning the checkout process on e-commerce sites, according to a survey released on Wednesday by PayPal Inc. Some 22% of 355 consumers who had abandoned shopping carts at a mix of large and small merchant sites before completing …