News

November, 2006

• 9 November

  Pricing, Retailing Rivalry Likely Led to Sam’s Club’s MasterCard Deal

  Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s decision to accept MasterCard Worldwide credit cards?but not credit cards from Visa USA–at its 500-plus Sam's Club stores stems from competitive forces in the warehouse retailing business, but may also signal the beginning of the end of uniformity of merchant acceptance of the two bank card brands. …
• 8 November

  All-Electronic Check Clearing Keeps Rising As Image Exchange Grows

  Checks cleared as electronic images continue to account for an increasing share of all image-based check traffic, even as an industry group works to hammer out a new system to accelerate the conversion to all-electronic check processing. Indeed, The Image Payments Network, an image-exchange network operated by The Clearing House …
• 7 November

  M-Commerce Execs Further Dim Prospects for Premium SMS

  In another indication that the days may be numbered for premium short-message service (SMS) as the dominant mobile-commerce payment channel, some 65% of executives in the entertainment, media, mobile, and broadband industries surveyed at a recent conference agreed that payments handled as direct charges by operators' billing systems will be …
• 6 November

  PayPal to Launch Promotion for Express Checkout Merchants

  PayPal Inc. will pour as much as $100 million into a new promotional campaign aimed at driving traffic to merchant sites that accept PayPal. The campaign, which kicks off Nov. 23 and includes cash-rebate offers between $10 and $20 as well as free shipping when consumers use PayPal, is entirely …
• 3 November

  A Processor Puts a Different Spin on Back-Office Conversion

  Check processor Solutran Inc. thinks it has found a way to make the new back-office conversion (BOC) e-check code more attractive to merchants: take the costly scanning process out the back office and outsource it. Plymouth, Minn.-based Solutran recently announced its SPIN service, for Solutran POS and Imaging Network. The …
• 2 November

  MasterCard Starts Test in Dallas of NFC Payment With OTA Downloads

  MasterCard Worldwide announced on Thursday the start of a contactless-payment pilot in Dallas using mobile phones enabled by near-field communication (NFC) technology. The pilot, which is expected to involve about 500 subscribers of 7-Eleven Inc.'s Speak Out Wireless service, is the second real-world test of NFC payment in the U.S. …
• 1 November

  Debit Traffic Soars at MasterCard While Ticket Sizes Drop

  Reporting results for its first full quarter as a publicly held company, MasterCard Inc. on Wednesday released statistics showing significant gains for its U.S. debit card brand. Signature-debit cards accounted for 1.39 billion point-of-sale transactions in the third quarter, a 62% jump over volume in the year-ago period. The product …

October, 2006

• 31 October

  Interchange Second Only to Energy Costs on Grocers’ Worry List

  With credit and debit cards accounting for nearly 46% of supermarket payments, card-acceptance fees now rank No. 2 behind energy costs among the top concerns of grocery-store executives, the Food Marketing Institute reports in its latest financial review of the grocery industry's financial health. In its 2005-2006 Annual Financial Review …
• 30 October

  Banks’ ATM Surcharges Hit New Record, As Do NSF Fees

  The average ATM surcharge assessed by banks has risen 4 cents in the past six months, to $1.64, but a drop in ATM foreign fees means banks will collect $4.2 billion in total ATM charges this year, down slightly from the $4.3 billion they took in in 2005. That's according …
• 30 October

  Check-ACH Coalition Issuing Survey to Help Shape Emerging Proposal

  A banking group that is exploring how to merge electronic image exchange with the automated clearing house network expects to distribute a survey on Tuesday to financial institutions seeking to find out what their plans are for image exchange and what barriers are slowing down their movement toward receiving and …