News

February, 2008

• 26 February

  An Acquiring Paradox: Discounts Are Squeezed, But Spreads Are up

  Counter-intuitive though it may be, independent sales organizations and merchant acquirers in general are seeing their spreads increase while simultaneously facing margin compression. The reason, according to a new report from Aite Group LLC assessing trends in the acquiring industry: acquirers are generating new revenues from their merchants outside of …
• 25 February

  Visa Looks for a Record IPO in Defiance of Wall Street Headwinds

  Facing financial markets that have been roiled by troubled subprime mortgages and a weakening economy, Visa Inc. on Monday said it is seeking to raise $15 billion to $17 billion in its upcoming initial public offering of common stock?an amount that even on the low end would be a record …
• 22 February

  Beleaguered Pay By Touch Looks To Sell Itself in Two Auctions

  With potential buyers so far proving to be no more than tire kickers, bankrupt biometrics payment company Solidus Networks Inc., which does business as Pay By Touch, is looking to sell itself in separate auctions of what it calls its core and non-core assets. The core assets center on Pay …
• 21 February

  MasterCard Cuts Interchange for Rent, Utilities, and Insurance

  Apartments and other rental real estate such as vacation properties, one of the great remaining virgin markets for electronic payments, could get a boost in April when a new MasterCard Inc. interchange incentive takes effect that will lower card-acceptance costs for property managers. MasterCard's program is intended to direct more …
• 21 February

  New York-New Jersey Mass Transit Plans Contactless Pilot

  Contactless payment took another step forward in the mass-transit market with the announcement on Thursday by two key New York City-area transportation agencies that they will run a pilot of MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass system next year. The Port Authority will install contactless readers at 40 turnstiles in all 13 of …
• 20 February

  How an Incentive Boom Could Push Visa, MasterCard into Acquiring

  Locked in increasingly fierce competition with each other and with other card networks, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Worldwide are paying out higher and higher sums to issuers and merchants in the form of rebates and incentives, a trend that not only hurts the bank card networks' yield on each dollar …
• 19 February

  With $20.5 Million in Fresh Capital, IPP Prepares To Execute

  Walk-in bill-payment provider IPP of America Inc. on Tuesday announced it had raised $20.5 million from three institutional investors, capital that will enable the fast-growing company to expand its physical presence and add more billers to its network. The investment also represents the first round of venture-capital financing arranged by …
• 19 February

  An APWG Panel Lobbies Web Registries to Shut Down Phishing Sites

  A potent new technique that phishing fraudsters have started using to thwart efforts to shut down their bogus Web sites has inspired a panel at the Anti-Phishing Working Group to hammer out a new policy that would get domain registries to disable criminal sites. The new policy, called the domain …
• 14 February

  Citi Makes a Down Payment on M-Payments with ViVOtech Stake

  Getting financial institutions and telecommunications providers to agree on major issues related to mobile payments is one of the most difficult problems faced by the nascent mobile-payments industry. Nonetheless, some banks want to plant a stake on the mobile-payments turf early, as evidenced by the announcement this week that Citigroup …
• 14 February

  TSYS Joins Rivals First Data, Metavante in Mobile Banking And Payments

  With its announcement on Thursday that it is working with a U.K. provider to enable mobile access to credit card accounts in the U.S., Total System Services Inc. (TSYS) has joined rival payments processors First Data Corp. and Metavante Corp. in entering the nascent but highly promising business of mobile …